


i’m alright, it only hurts when i breathe

by amorremanet



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (in ch. 23 + he gives Keith blow-jobs in chs. 12 & 25), (in chs. 15 + 23), Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Porn, Angst and Humor, Angst with a Happy Ending, Autistic Keith (Voltron), Autistic Shiro (Voltron), Body Image, Bottom Keith (Voltron), Bottom Shiro (Voltron), By an admittedly loose definition of that term, Camboy Keith (Voltron), Chubby Keith (Voltron), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Feeding Kink, Gay Disaster Shiro (Voltron), Hanahaki Disease, Idiots in Love, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, M/M, Magical Realism as an excuse for kinky bullshit and flower coughing diseases, Mental Health Issues, Mutual Pining, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Abuse, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Romantic Comedy, Shiro (Voltron) Makes Bad Life Choices, Shiro (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Shiro (Voltron) is a Mess, Situational Humiliation, That is what fiction means., The good end happily. The bad are minor characters & get told off. Kinky funtimes are had., Verbal Humiliation, Weight Gain, Weight Issues, chubby!kink, past bullying
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-14 08:36:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 367,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21012884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorremanet/pseuds/amorremanet
Summary: Hanahaki disease is common and usually non-lethal. Your love—romantic, platonic, or familial—seems unreciprocated, you cough up annoyingly symbolic flowers, then you get over-the-counter meds and go about your life. Fatal Hanahaki mostly exists in opera, and outside bodice-rippers, you don’t find many people who’ve never had a flare-up.Nearing his 28th birthday, aspiring filmmaker Shiro has never hacked up a petal. Returning home from 18 months in California means returning to Keith. Shiro’s pined over his best friend for ages. Still, he hasn’t felt Keith’s red azaleas tickling at the back of his throat. Surely, Keith hasn’t coughed up any of Shiro’s black roses, either. True, he coughs up flowers every other week—but Shiro was fat before he left, and used that to justify keeping his romantic feelings secret.But now, Shiro finds that some of his longest-harbored fantasies have come to life. Keith put on weight while Shiro was gone and loves his chubby body. So do Keith’s online clients, who’ve been shelling out money hand over fist for Keith’s amateur porn clips. Getting his head around this change and confessing his feelings would be difficult enough for Shiro—but then Keith asks him to be his costar.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, this has been mostly finished and sitting around my google docs and hard drive for a long-ass while. I’ve been writing it on and off for going on two years. It’s been long enough that I retconned a minor NPC—Shiro’s ex-boyfriend from high school—into Adam because that was easier than just continuing to have NPC Cameron and anticipating comments like, “Um, sweaty, Shiro’s ex is named Adam, actually, that’s what’s in canon (((:”
> 
> Anyway, I wasn’t going to post all of it until it was done, but then, last weekend, I had the thought, “Fuck it, this might as well happen. Maybe just starting to post this will somehow make finishing the last few chapters easier.”
> 
> This will be a long one, and I’ll try to put more detailed/better warnings/content notes before each chapter, because there’s some emotionally heavy stuff that comes up later (in particular regarding Shiro’s experience of getting pretty mercilessly bullied in high school, and the extent to which, despite taking his therapy seriously and working on himself, he still feels like there’s no way that Keith could ever want him back Because Reasons).
> 
> Basically, though, Shiro spends a lot of time in this fic acting like a typical rom-com protagonist—not in the sense of hiring a marching band to back him up while he serenades Keith with “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You,” or exhibiting behaviors that most people would call stalking or harassment, but in the sense of being a dumb-ass and making stunningly terrible life choices. He’s going to be okay, in the end. But he’s going to be an idiot, first.
> 
> **Minor romantic ships of relevance:** Hunk/Lotor and Allura/Lance/Ryou. Pidge/Nyma and Slav/Sven also get mentioned.
> 
> **Past romantic ships of note:** Adam/Shiro, Lotor/Shiro, Sendak/Shiro (but this is one of those rare and special AUs where Sendak isn’t a douchebag, and they broke up for other reasons), Hunk/Keith, Allura/Keith.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has a LOT of self-aimed fat-shaming out of Shiro (and this continues for a while, which is either fortunate or not, depending on whether or not that hits a kink button for you, I guess). There are also references to his experiences with bullying and his mental health issues, and some offhand references to Keith’s and Lotor’s respective backstories and traumas.
> 
> Also, apologies for the fact that the first few chapters go for the kink, but not so much for the actual porn. Keith and Shiro get around to it eventually, though.

As something hot prickles in the back of his throat, Shiro uses one hand to brace himself on the edge of the men’s room sink and drags the other through his hair.

Tugging his long, bleached-white forelock doesn’t ground him in the moment any better. Doesn’t make him feel any less like his head might spin clean off his shoulders. He takes slow, deep breaths, exactly as his myriad therapists have coached him. He shakes his head and leans it back, just to feel the ends of his hair brushing against his spine. Muffled through his shirt, that sensation doesn’t help him as much as it could. Neither does running his fingers down his hair, from scalp to tips. Or combing it back into a ponytail that he doesn’t tie just yet.

None of this makes Shiro’s heart quit its stop-and-start jerking. Nothing makes him feel less like he’s sitting on a cough that won’t come up already. But at least he breathes a little easier, losing his fingers in something soft.

Slouched between Shiro’s sink and the hot air hand-dryer to his left, Lotor sighs and knocks his head back against the wall. “Darling, _please_,” he whines. “If you are going to insist on holding us up like this, then will you at least tell me what, exactly, you wish to accomplish? Perhaps I can help. As much as you ever allow anybody to help, I mean.”

Shiro tries to lean closer to the mirror without bending over too far. Aside from messing up his posture in ways he’ll need to fix with old acting class warm-up stretches, slouching makes his belly pooch out further than it would on its own. Bad posture is murder for his appearance, in that way. The slightest droop to Shiro’s shoulders or his wide, plush hips pushes his stomach out against whatever shirt he’s wearing, makes it strain the fabric of even the loosest fitting ones. As though that isn’t horrible enough, the wrong kind of slouching—which somehow, is always the kind of slouching that Shiro slips into when he doesn’t pay attention—makes Shiro look bigger and fatter overall, something he needs no help with. He looks fat enough already.

It’s unavoidable, though. Trying not to spread his feet squishes his flabby thighs together, testing the seams of whatever jeans or sweatpants Shiro’s wearing. Trying to meet shorter people’s eyes emphasizes the softness of his chins and neck, but holding his head up makes people wonder who Shiro thinks he’s fooling, as if there’s any way that he can hide. Trying not to take up too much space makes Shiro look like he’s too huge to ever fit in anywhere. Damned if he does, screwed if he doesn’t, Shiro doesn’t have much in the way of options, with his body. There’s no way for him to hold himself that doesn’t emphasize his girth, that doesn’t make his gut look bigger or his hips look even wider than they are, that doesn’t showcase what an inhumanly large, plumped up, tubby _fat-ass_ Shiro has allowed himself to—

A deep yawn cuts into Shiro’s thoughts. Then, a string of grumbling out of Lotor.

“Red-eye flights are a cruel and unusual punishment that no one should _ever_ be forced to suffer,” he says, folding his arms over his chest and drumming his long, spidery fingers along his elbow. “Not that we had a _choice_, given when we had to clear out of our accommodations. But even so…” Tipping his head back, Lotor yawns again. “I _cannot_ with red-eye flights.”

Blessedly yanked out of his own head, Shiro ducks his chin. Nothing pooches out around his jawline, which makes him look down. He inhales sharply when he doesn’t see his belly pressed up against the sink, but finds an empty space where it’s supposed to be. Wrinkling his nose, he tries to keep his breathing steady—but then his eyes settle on the reflection of his stomach. Thanks to his black Emilie Autumn crop-top, everything’s out on display. Sharp hip-bones peek past the low-riding waistband of Shiro’s jeans and press against his tawny skin. Firm sides with no love-handles or pudgy bulges in sight, completely at odds with the pale, faded stretch marks still littering Shiro’s middle. At least his jeans conceal the potentially integrity-smirching surgical scar that Shiro wouldn’t have gotten had it not become a medical necessity.

In the center of it all, where nobody can miss them, sit his abs. Shiro trembles, looking at them in the mirror, and part of him still can’t help wondering where his huge, hideous, jiggling gut has gotten off to. Taking a deep breath, he pulls his stomach tighter. Shiro brushes his hand from the bottom of his shirt to the top of his belt, to remind himself that he is not hallucinating. This isn’t a dream, either. His abs are very real, painstakingly carved out in the past eighteen months, in between the work that he and Lotor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Looking at Shiro now, nobody would guess that he’d ever been fat. No one would guess that most of his friends have never seen Shiro weighing less than three-hundred pounds.

Even with a year-and-a-half of hard work behind him, Shiro isn’t entirely used to how losing weight has changed his body. Even with a year-and-a-half of unposted selfies chronicling the process, he’s waiting for the rug to get ripped out from under him, for reality to knock him down as punishment for ever wanting something different from how he was before. Splaying his palm over his stomach, he looks down at the thing itself. When he grips and prods his flesh, he only finds hard muscle. No give to it whatsoever, nowhere to lose his fingertips. Which is the first hint that this has to be a dream—and yet, it isn’t.

“_Darling_, please,” Lotor needles, as if he can read Shiro’s thoughts. As if he can smell Shiro’s anxiety over the acrid stink of urinal cakes and fake-lemon-scented cleaners. “Are you preening so much that you forgot to speak, or are you having an absence seizure? I can’t tell.”

“_Neither_, okay?” Shiro’s cheeks flush hot, because his ex-boyfriend-turned-creative partner has once more caught him in the act of being some kind of total head-case, probably. Straightening up, he fusses with his long bangs. He combs his fingers through the bleached-white fringe on his right. Fluffs the black clump on his left. Tries to make them frame his face in a way that looks artfully, effortlessly messy.

Glancing at Lotor’s pointedly arched eyebrow, Shiro sighs. “I’m_ fine_, okay? Nerves. Nothing major. Annoying, not serious.”

“Perhaps. But that assessment is not particularly reassuring, coming from the man who once spent three weeks insisting that his pneumonia was, ‘just a bad cold.’” The full effect of the calling-out is somewhat dulled by Lotor quirking his fingers into quotation marks. “What do you hope to achieve with this unnecessary, early-morning peacocking. I cannot be of assistance if I don’t know what you’re going for.”

“I’m not going for _anything_ in particular, really? I just…” Shiro sighs and glares at his reflection. No, now his hair is _too_ messy—“I want to look hot enough for Keith, okay? Like I _didn’t_ just spend over seven hours trapped in a flying sardine can and barely slept.”

“_Keith_ thought you were hot enough to be with him before we left—”

“Don’t start. Not right now.”

“I am simply speaking truths. I doubt that Keith expects you to look ready for a photoshoot. Showing up like that will likely confuse him.” Lotor shrugs as if nothing’s bothering him, but he’s using the tone of voice that calls someone an idiot but denies them the satisfaction of hearing him say it outright. Scrunching up his face like an irritated kitten, he adds, “The _changes_ to your appearance will be enough for him to handle without making him wonder why you look ready to pose for a sexy calendar.”

Although Shiro doesn’t have a retort in mind, he locks his eyes on Lotor and opens his mouth as if he’s getting ready to deliver a scathing verbal evisceration. Thankfully, someone else in the restroom starts coughing like they have firecrackers trying to burst out from their lungs. Shiro’s head whips around while Lotor turns to look more leisurely, but they see the same thing. An older man, balding and wearing a rumpled suit that’s the same off-grey shade as the restroom stalls, hunches over one of the sinks toward the middle of the row and holds a handkerchief to his mouth. The coughing grows louder, echoing off the high ceiling. Helpless to stop it, the man goes white-knuckled, clinging to the edge of his sink as though his life depends on it.

After several moments, he gives up a single wet hacking sound. With a shiver, he pulls the handkerchief away from his mouth. In the center of his palm sits a heap of curled up, magenta petals. On top of those sits a single, perfect blossom in the exact same shade. From here, Shiro thinks that it might be a peony. His Mom always liked peonies before she died, though she would’ve hated the color of the one that this guy’s holding. In fairness, it’s garish, but the man can’t help that. Hanahaki Disease doesn’t let you have a say in what kinds of flowers you cough up, for whom, or when. It can happen for romantic love, platonic, or familial. At least flare-ups are nothing to write home about. Annoying and sometimes painful but ultimately, only one case out of fifty million ever gets anywhere in the neighborhood of lethal.

As far as Shiro knows, the only way to keep some semblance of control over yourself is to simply never get a bout of Hanahaki Disease. Then again, in Shiro’s experience, that often makes people wonder if you might be heartless, so maybe control isn’t worth it, in this case.

Whatever the flower is, whatever it signifies to the one whose lungs produced it, the man frowns at it as if he’s caught a whiff of a road-killed skunk. Dragging a small suitcase behind him, he pauses only long enough to dump the petals into one of the garbage cans. Without knowing the whole story, Shiro shouldn’t judge, but something about the sight forces him to bite back a snarl. This, in turn, makes Lotor scoff.

“How can he do something like that,” Shiro hisses. “Would _you_ just throw out a symbol of love?”

“If you ever blossom for someone, _please_ do not turn into one of those sad, hopeless cases who creates a scrapbook of their sentimental pneumo-flora. Or _worse_: puts them up on Etsy.” Lotor pointedly arches an eyebrow. “I swear, Takashi. I will creatively divorce you.”

“Lucky me,” Shiro deadpans. “At this point? That’s probably never going to happen.”

Not that Shiro doubts the threat, because Lotor would totally make good on it. But he’d change his mind as soon as he realized that a creative divorce meant writing his own grant proposals and finding someone else to hit a drive-through for him when he’s too drunk to get his own McNuggets. Their arguments are never fun, but the two of them always work things out.

Shiro having Hanahaki and being embarrassingly maudlin about it is the part that won’t come to pass. In six weeks, he and his brother Ryou will turn twenty-eight, and Shiro’s never coughed up a single petal. Sure, there are late bloomers. One of Shakespeare’s lost plays, allegedly, tells the story of an older widow who has her first experience with Hanahaki over the young rake who rolls into her idyllic country town with a mind to fleece the local Duke and steal his outrageous fortune. One of the professors who mentored Shiro and Lotor at USC was forty-seven when he first started coughing up a florist’s shop. Every so often, one of Lotor’s favorite gossip websites will post a story of dubious veracity about some elderly loner who never believed they could find love until three weeks ago, when they finally caught Hanahaki for someone.

Clearing his throat, Lotor gives Shiro a _Significant Look_. Without words, it asks if he’s quite finished insulting both of their intelligences yet.

Rather than attempt to play whatever game Lotor thinks this is, Shiro scrubs his hand down his face, tugging on the faint dark circle underneath one eye. Overhead fluorescent lighting brings his abs into sharper relief and showcases how defined his high cheekbones have gotten as he’s lost over two hundred pounds. Shiro appreciates that. The light makes him look good now, makes it easier to remember how much he’s thinned out—but it’s doing no favors for the signs of how little sleep he sometimes gets.

“Can you get the concealer out of my backpack? Front pocket at the top.” When Lotor grouses, Shiro openly rolls his eyes. “Keith hasn’t texted yet. We have time before they even unload our luggage, much less let us collect it. Let me pretty up a bit, okay?”

Shaking out his long, purple ponytail and his black trench-coat, Lotor crouches by Shiro’s backpack. But as he fumbles with a zipper, he says, “You wouldn’t need to pretty up if you had simply listened to me eighteen months ago. You were perfectly gorgeous, then. Not to mention much more enjoyable to snuggle. Thus, no cosmetics necessary.”

Shiro chokes down a budding groan, but only because they’re in a public restroom. This conversation is already drawing a few stares and making the hair on the back of Shiro’s neck prick up. Keeping his voice low, he says, “Do. _Not_. Start—”

“I’ve already _started_, though. If you wish to split hairs, I started back then and have never truly stopped.” Without getting up from the floor, Lotor glares at Shiro. His bright blue eyes glint like a switchblade as he holds up a black plastic container. Thankfully, he waits for Shiro to start dabbing concealer on his under-eye circles before telling him, “I do not discount the hard work you’ve done, darling. I also begrudgingly admit that, although I much preferred your so-called ‘before picture’ body? Even as a skinny bitch, you remain _unfairly_ beautiful—”

“I still weigh more than you do, Ballerina Barbie—”

“Yes, but you don’t have love-handles anymore,” Lotor drawls. “So, honestly, what’s the point?”

“Can you please exercise some volume control?” It’s taking an incredible amount of effort for Shiro not to look at the other restroom patrons, or to draw more attention to himself and Lotor by making apologies for him. “My point is that you, of all people? Have no business calling anybody _skinny_. Especially not when you say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“In your case, it _is_ a bad thing. If you wanted to desecrate a priceless, irreplaceable work of art, why couldn’t you spray-paint phalluses all over the Sistine Chapel? That would have been infinitely preferable to you losing weight.” Lotor’s lips quirk in the way they always do when he thinks he’s up to something. As he puts the container back in Shiro’s bag, though, he apparently decides that smirking isn’t worth the effort. “I only say such things because they’re true.”

Washing off his hands, Shiro counters, “You say them because you enjoy riling me up in public.”

“These aspects of the situation are far from mutually exclusive.” Despite his casual tone, Lotor’s eyes flash and he arches a brow as if offering Shiro a chance to recant. When he doesn’t, Lotor tells him, “Darling, if I truly wanted to rile you up? I would point out that you have no business acting like you were unfuckable before slimming down. You, of _all people_, ought to be aware that larger men are desirable. I know you have more in your _immense _erotic stash than BDSM bodice-rippers. I know about the _full. Dimensions. _of your sexually stimulating fantasies. I know that you love Keith, no matter what, but can’t help wishing that he would _gain_ some—”

“_Stop_,” Shiro hisses. Shaking his head, he pauses to pick up his backpack and his jacket. He tries to pull himself back from blushing, but gets nowhere. But since he can’t let Lotor win this one, not even when he’s right, Shiro flips his bangs off his face and makes himself look Lotor in the eye. “Having twisted taste in erotica doesn’t mean that I want those fantasies to actually be real, okay? I can live without subjecting some poor guy to them, and for myself? I _never_ want to get that big again. I looked horrible, and I _felt_ worse—”

“_Our_ shared kinks are far from twisted, darling.” Lotor stretches as he stands, briefly revealing a strip of his own perfectly lithe, stretch mark-free stomach. As he works a knot out his shoulders, he blows his long cowlick off his pointy, golden face. “The fact that I explicitly prefer larger men does not mean that I am wrong about how beautiful you were—”

“Right now? I’m not _saying_ that you’re wrong.” Grabbing the handle of his rolling bag, he looks Lotor dead in the eye and explains, “I’m saying that you’re being way too loud for talking about things like this in the middle of a public restroom.”

“Ugh, but shame is so _tedious_, Takashi. Why do we put up with it…”

Complaining aside, Lotor stays close to Shiro as they meander through the terminal. As difficult as he’s choosing to be right now, having Lotor around helps. Last time they were here, Shiro hunched in around himself and shuffled along quietly, trying to avoid too much attention. Inevitably, his face and neck heated up when nothing he did could make people stop staring at him. Wide-eyed parents sighed in disgust, pulling their kids out of Shiro’s path, and people snickered, each time Lotor dragged Shiro onto one of the moving walkways.

Lotor swore that he heard nothing, but someone _must _have overheard one of Shiro’s protests and hissed, _“Who does he think he’s fooling? Get up on the conveyor belt already, Butterball, before you give yourself a heart attack.”_

He can’t blame them. Standing just shy of six-foot-four, he tipped the scales at four-hundred-and-thirty-five pounds when he and Lotor left. Far too big and always feeling it, Shiro didn’t give anyone the option _not_ to notice him. Even his largest clothes clung to his immense hips, his bulky thighs, his massive gut. T-shirts stretched to their limits around his enormous, bulging waistline and his drooping, heavy arms. His middle only barely squeezed into his button-ups, always threatening to lose their buttons, and when Shiro stripped out of them, his work-shirts had enough fabric for him to pitch a tent. Pants with elastic waistbands struggled to contain his prodigious girth, leaving indentations in Shiro’s skin, giving him little reminders that he exceeded the limitations of jeans and khakis whose limits were not meant too exist.

He wasn’t even big like Hunk is big, where the chub was somewhat balanced out with muscle. Every ponderous step that Shiro took made his entire body quiver, sent waves of impact through his unwieldy, jiggling flab. He couldn’t hold anybody’s sneers against them, not when he knew that they were _right_ to be revolted by his body. Any the reason that they needed was right there, in plain view, bulging out of Shiro’s sides and protruding from his middle, all sagging, thick, and cumbersome. A perfect morality tale for kids about eating all their vegetables, or motivation for someone to get back to the gym after an illness or an injury, to stop eating comfort ice cream after getting dumped. _“Gotta get a handle on this, before I let myself go as much as that guy. You can never be too careful.”_

Besides, it wasn’t like he had any room to disagree with those reactions. Shiro felt more disgusted than the normal people could imagine with what a bloated, sloppy pig he was—he’d called himself practically every disparaging thing that could’ve been thrown his way—so how could he judge _anyone_ for feeling the same way? Walking around made Shiro nauseated, with the way his body shook and the perpetual burn of shame that flushed his cheeks. Even if he managed not to _waddle_ when he walked, his hips and belly would always sway from side to side, refusing to let Shiro off the hook from feeling just how corpulent he really was. The worst part of working out was powering through it when his flesh started wobbling, turning how queasy, gross, and _huge_ he felt into motivation to keep going, instead of letting himself get sick about what a giant, whopping whale he’d let himself turn into.

Unfortunately, _not_ moving wasn’t any better. People always stared, no matter what Shiro did. They always grimaced at him, or made a retching sound as they walked past, or shook their heads in pity, quietly distraught about how a fellow human being had allowed himself to get so big. Standing at the screens that list the different gate assignments, Shiro could barely focus on whether or not his and Lotor’s flight to LA had gotten moved. As much as he tried, he couldn’t help noticing the snide looks that he drew, waiting for someone to catcall him or offer a pamphlet about another alleged miracle weight loss cure, and wondering what the normal people thought about him.

Not that he had any trouble guessing. After being on the larger side of chubby since childhood and undeniably fat since adolescence, Shiro knew the sorts of things that _normal_ people had to say about him and his body: _“Hoping for a reassignment, Tubby? Checking to see how far you have to walk, you gigantic tub of lard? It’s bad enough you had to buy yourself two seats, but now you can’t even waddle all the way down to the gate and claim them? Maybe it’d be better if you didn’t. Go on, give someone else the treat of not having to sit crammed in next to your big, fat, blubber-laden ass. How can any human being even let themself go as much as you have, Chubbo? Don’t you have any kind of self-respect? Did you lose it in those massive jelly-rolls you’re packing, or did you stuff it in your mouth with those freaking cookies that you didn’t need? God, Shiro, how did you even let this happen? You’re **disgusting**…”_

—True, no one said any of that aloud, not within earshot of him or Lotor. Then again, maybe it would have been better if they had. Conveying the sentiment with their facial expressions provided them a shield of plausible deniability. That silence made Lotor feel like Shiro was being far too sensitive to insults that hadn’t been flung. If someone had said something, though, it would’ve hurt. Shiro wouldn’t have enjoyed hearing the truth how much he disgusted people. But at least he would’ve known that this wasn’t simply in his head.

Now, he keeps his head down and weaves through the crowd just like anybody else who’s of an average size. No one snickers when he and Lotor slouch onto a moving walkway, eyeing Shiro until he spots them and then whispering something to a traveling companion. Shiro’s breath hitches when one parent moves their child out of his way, but he breathes easier when they glare at Lotor instead of him. The parent even gives a tight, polite smile when Shiro apologizes for his ex.

Checking the status of their baggage on a screen, Shiro feels stares coming his way, but he can’t figure out from where or why. He feels none of the judgment or condemnation that he knew before. He doesn’t feel anybody snickering when Lotor complains about being hungry and Shiro only supposes that he should probably eat something. Confusingly, he doesn’t even feel any sneers or recrimination when he tugs Lotor into the long queue outside the McDonald’s. It used to be unavoidable at any fast food place, whether Shiro ate anything himself or not.

Some people turn to look when Lotor groans and face-plants onto Shiro’s shoulder, but given the Lotor of it all, that makes sense. Tall, slender guys with waist-length purple ponytails are in short enough supply, never mind them whining as they hug their ex-boyfriends around the middle. Before Shiro can decide whether or not he’s okay with this, Lotor tugs himself into Shiro’s side, as close as he can get with Shiro’s backpack in the way. Some PTA Mother-looking patron wrinkles her nose at them and doesn’t soften when Shiro gives her a bashful, _“Please forgive him, he’s exhausted and he can’t resist an opportunity for drama” _smile.

Thankfully, Lotor keeps him from dwelling too much on what she is or isn’t thinking. The hug and the plaintive grumbling would’ve managed that, but he goes all-in on this. As if he can sense that Shiro needs distraction to keep him grounded in the present moment, though, Lotor goes all-in on providing that. His nose is sharp as it bumps on the side of Shiro’s neck, his arms hold fast to Shiro as if they’re still together, and his cold hands make gooseflesh spring up on Shiro’s abs. Maybe it’s not as typical of him as complaining, sarcasm, or trying to be a twenty-first century filmmaking Oscar Wilde, but Lotor demanding affection is still comforting in its familiarity.

Then, Lotor feels compelled to mumble, “God, I miss not being able to embrace all of you… All of your plush, soft jiggle—”

“But I _don’t_ miss that.” Shiro sighs indulgently at Lotor’s wordless grouching and reaches back to (somewhat awkwardly) pat his head. But as he palms his jeans in search of his wallet, he tells Lotor, “I’m not going over this with you again. Not until we’ve both had coffee. Then, you can at least fake like you’re listening to anything I say.”

“I _listen _to you,” he protests, lazily nuzzling at Shiro’s shoulder. “We simply have a difference of opinion.”

“Well, keep hugging me if you want. At least this way, people are staring at me for a _reason_.”

Lotor snorts. “You wore a crop-top to the airport in the middle of January. What did you _think_ would happen?”

“Just because I wanted _Keith_ to see my abs doesn’t mean I, like—”

“Are you actually Harry Potter now, Takashi? Not simply because you have your mother’s eyes, I mean. Did you think your intentions would act as your Invisibility Cloak?”

“No, I just! I was only thinking about, y’know… I wanted _Keith_ to see, but not really with…”

“Honestly, why are you even trying so hard to impress him? For one thing, Keith would love literally anything you did. For another, though? We are talking about a man whose favorite _Star Wars_ film is _Attack of the Clones_—”

“_Return of the Jedi_ is his favorite. He just defends _Attack of the Clones_ because he identifies with Anakin during the, ‘I don’t like sand’ scene. Because Keith has that same kind of trouble communicating his feelings, and he thought Hayden Christensen delivered the line, like…”

Shiro trails off as Lotor snickers at him. Cheeks flushing hot with embarrassment, he keeps inching them forward in line and tries to tune Lotor out. He should be grateful that Lotor isn’t full-body cracking up. It’s bad enough that he doesn’t finish laughing by their turn at the counter. Pushing his long white forelock behind one ear, Shiro smiles at the poor girl who takes their order of two large coffees, a sausage-egg-and-cheese McMuffin, and two orders of hash-browns.

As he’s trying to pay up, Lotor scratches Shiro’s belly button. “You _know_ that coffee is not an acceptable breakfast.”

Shiro swallows his objections and throws a fruit-and-yogurt parfait into their order. His coffee’s gone when they get to the baggage claim, so he cracks open the confection in a further show of compromise. Leaning against a column by their carousel, he focuses on dispelling the impulse to wolf down his breakfast as quickly as possible so he can get it over with. Unconcerned with such things himself, Lotor scarfs up his own food so fast, it’s a wonder that he doesn’t choke. All he currently cares about is how his food won’t taste as good if it gets cold.

His ex makes it look so easy, but Shiro can’t afford to eat like that. He forces himself to keep his breathing measured, to keep his eyes on his spoon and not the predictions of when his and Lotor’s luggage will get here. Even after a year-and-a-half of truly working on his weight problem instead of screwing up his desperation diets, that habit of eating too quickly remains one of Shiro’s worst. According to Dr. Carter back in California, it was one of the behaviors that most contributed to how badly Shiro let himself go after his and Ryou’s Grandfather first got sick, then to how much more weight he piled on after Ojiisan died.

Grief was understandable, of course. Ojiisan had taken Shiro and Ryou in and raised them after their parents died. Aside from each other, he’d been the only official family they had—at least, the only family who was close enough. Aunt Satomi and her wife Naoko live out in Rancho Cucamonga, and Cousin Sven from Mom’s side didn’t move to the States from Oslo until he lost his own parents a few years ago. In theory, he could’ve gone back to Kyoto, but the Tenō side of the family doesn’t like him, either.

Shiro, in particular, got to inherit Ojiisan’s personal name, _Takashi_, and got asked to hold the old man’s hand when he finally passed. No one expected Shiro, then barely twenty-one, to handle this loss as well as he wanted everyone to think he did. Given how much he lied about keeping everything together while going through a series of increasingly empty motions, it made sense that Shiro’s body rebelled against him and let the whole world see how far gone he was getting.

Turns out that all the little things Shiro learned about with Dr. Carter—eating slowly, not eating while distracted, listening to your body in different ways, working out in the right ways and not only the ones you think are fun, even the size of your plates—matter so much more than he knew back then. So, Shiro paid those things no mind at all. He didn’t take care of himself and very quickly went from kinda chubby to full-on fat, with no end to his gaining anywhere in sight. By the time Keith and Ryou dragged him to a therapist, Shiro had put on enough weight that he spent his first appointment with Ulaz squirming in jeans that barely fit and a t-shirt that struggled to cover his more-than-ample paunch.

Slimming down like Shiro’s managed is supposed to feel like victory, like he’s finally triumphed over something that’s held him back for so long, because that’s exactly what he’s done.

Whittling his waistline down from seventy-six inches of flab, when he was at his biggest, to the normal size he’s wearing now? Getting down to a weight that Shiro hasn’t seen on the scale since summer break he was twelve, when he stood about five-foot-seven and had no muscle worthy of a mention? This is supposed to feel _good_.

Shiro’s supposed to feel like he’s _accomplished_ something because of how he’s toned up while slimming down, making sure that his two-hundred-and-fifteen pounds are firm and compact, instead of jiggly, plump, and bulging out of every spot along his body. Because of how he’s finally gotten himself together and figured out how to best eat and work out, instead of recreating every attempted diet that he ever blew and crying his eyes out like he did during his sixth grade Christmas Eve after seeing _251.5_ on his grandparents’ bathroom scale. Because of how hard he’s fought to carve out the body and the abs that he’s always wanted, changing the things he doesn’t like about himself instead of wallowing in imaginary helplessness and getting up to a full _five_-hundred pounds, at _least_.

Sadly, Shiro’s lost the weight and he’s still stuck with all those feelings that refuse to simply wither up and die. The clawing, nagging sense that he hasn’t really achieved anything, like he hasn’t put any actual work or effort into any of what he’s done, like nothing he does will ever be good enough for anybody.

But shouldn’t he feel a little bit _excited_ when his phone buzzes with a text from Keith: _[Hey, we’ll be in soon. Where are you guys?]_

Instead of what he’s supposed to feel, a shiver courses down Shiro’s spine and his stomach feels ready to drop right out of him. His body tenses like a rubber-band pulled to the snapping point. His lungs clench in on themselves as if they don’t want to let him breathe. His head spins but it feels like he has a swamp where his brain should be. Oh God, Shiro could just about faint. As the conveyor belt in front of them starts slowly spinning, carrying out the first suitcases from their flight, Lotor nudges Shiro’s shoulder.

Instead of needling or dishing out sarcasm, he whispers, “Are you alright?”

“Nerves, still,” Shiro mutters, stirring his spoon around the parfait, poking the yogurt. “Nothing unmanageable, though. Which I realize isn’t terribly reassuring, when it comes from me, but… I’m just a little anxious. For whatever a promise from me is worth right now.”

With a pensive frown, Lotor scrutinizes Shiro’s face for a moment before giving up and asking, “Would you prefer snark or a softer hand right now, darling? I’m too tired to tell and I would feel horrid if I incorrectly guessed and hurt you. Especially right before a grand, emotional reunion with your beloved.”

“Snark, please. I need a distraction.” Shiro says it so quickly that he almost thinks to reconsider. But the skin along the back of his neck starts crawling like he has insects lurking underneath it, and Shiro decides, “Definitely snark. Dwelling on things will put me even more on-edge. By the time Keith gets here? I need to _not_ look like I just stumbled off a red-eye after getting delayed by a blizzard that didn’t end up coming.”

“But you _did_ get off a red-eye that was delayed by snow that has not yet graced us with its presence…” Watching for their bags, Lotor idly blows at his cowlick. It bobs a few times, then wilts over his eye. “Consider yourself lucky that the aspiring David Beckham behind us did not deny you most of your attempts at rest. I swear, six-year-olds were created by Satan to torment our entire species.”

Shiro chuckles. “You were once a six-year-old.”

“Hmm, no, I don’t think I was. Even considering my childhood, that seems too far-fetched—”

“I offered to switch seats with you—”

“You were sitting in the middle, darling. What sort of monster would I have been if I had forced you to wake up every time I needed to visit the restroom?” As if anticipating Shiro’s objection, Lotor rushes to add, “Also, the old woman next to you stank like death and garlic. As if she bathes twice-daily in embalming fluid and antiseptic, while devouring whole cloves. I had no wish to risk vomiting on your lap. Not needing to scour the inside of my mouth in a cramped space was also a delightful bonus. As much as anything _can _be when one is getting kicked by an obnoxious urchin or nauseated by the Grim Reaper’s paramour.”

“She wasn’t _that_ bad, you drama queen…”

That said, Shiro is grateful that he packed a stick of deodorant in his carry-on. Wouldn’t do to have any of their flying partner’s residual smell on him when Keith and Lance get here. Unless Lance has gotten some full personality transplant in the past year-and-a-half, he’d mostly make fun of Shiro and ask where he was hiding the garlic knots. Keith, however, is far more sensitive to smells. He might pick up on the vaguely mortuary stench instead and get understandably disgusted by it. He might decide that there’s something wrong with Shiro, which would murder any romantic overtones in their reunion and throw them in the Charles River.

But worrying about that isn’t helping; Shiro needs to keep his mind on the positive things. Keith and Lance will be here soon. Better yet, there’s a chance for good things to happen when Shiro finally tells Keith how he feels about him. Now, he’s someone who deserves to be with Keith.

Even if he never returns Shiro’s romantic affections, though? Even if he thinks becoming lovers would be too complicated, then being back beside him will be good enough. Calling, texting, and emailing his best friend has worked alright in a pinch. Or for an extended period of time while Shiro been’s on the other side of the country, chasing his dream of making movies. But that long-distance talking isn’t the same as being able to flop in his bed and ask him for some TLC at all hours of the night. It’s not the same as going to Montgomery’s, the all-night diner a couple blocks from the apartment that they share with Hunk, because one of them felt down and craved a strawberry milkshake (Shiro) or a bacon cheeseburger the size of his head (Keith).

Granted, those strawberry milkshakes helped make Shiro too big fat to be with Keith. No matter what Keith may or may not have believed before, the fact remains: Shiro weighed more than twice what Keith did when they left for California. Keith never gave up on him, but that didn’t mean that Shiro could have been Keith’s boyfriend. Anybody could’ve seen that they didn’t belong together, romantically. After all, Keith’s always had an enviably tiny waist, thighs that were only thick with muscle, and a perky ass that drove his online clients crazy. Shiro, meanwhile, jiggled all over, could barely squeeze himself into specialty fat-ass clothing sizes, and needed a scale that announced how fat he was because he couldn’t see the numbers around his gut.

Worse, there’s the way that people couldn’t help staring at Shiro, considering his enormous thighs, his massive ass, and his disgusting, flab-encrusted belly. How could he have subjected Keith to the grimaces of revulsion and contempt that would have fallen on him any time that he took Shiro on any kind of date? How could he have forced Keith to deal with the humiliation of having a boyfriend so fat, he popped buttons and split seams when they went out to dinner? Even if Keith wouldn’t have minded, the judgment would’ve worn on him eventually, and how could Shiro have asked for his best friend to suffer that indignity?

But Shiro’s gotten himself together and he doesn’t need to pine anymore. Before dinner with The Gang tonight, he’ll finally talk to Keith about his feelings. He’ll get an answer, one way or the other. Everything will be different. Everything will be _better_.

While Lotor darts away and grabs two of their suitcases, Shiro makes himself down the last two bites of his parfait. With his hands freed up, he grabs a third and tacks on, “Yes, our traveling companion was easier to put up with after she fell asleep, but see…” He boops Lotor’s nose and smirks at bringing out Lotor’s irritated kitten face again. “I think that you’re just jealous.”

Lotor cringes with a sound like he’s trying not to puke. “Of what, pray tell, would I _possibly_ be jealous?”

“I don’t know…” Shiro shrugs, heaves their last piece of luggage off the belt. Once he’s set it with the others, he scans the crowd for Keith and Lance. Coming up with a whole lot of nothing, Shiro glances back at Lotor and tells him, “Maybe you’re upset about her asking why a nice boy like me was traveling with an ill-tempered wreck like you.”

“Ah, yes. Of course,” Lotor deadpans, slumping back against their column. “Because I am _so_ deeply, crushingly desperate for validation from even the most vaguely maternal figures that I would hate her for calling you nice. Never mind that you _are_ nice, most of the time. Further ignore the far simpler and perfectly rational explanation that I already provided for you—”

Which is when a familiar voice rings out over the crowd, “Oh my God, coming through!”

Shiro turns toward the doors just in time for Hurricane Lance to barrel through, wrapped in a navy hoodie and skinny jeans. A mess of pent-up energy and gangly limbs as always, he shoves Shiro aside instead of asking him to move or, more expectedly, hugging Shiro and grinning at him and spilling more details than Shiro ever wanted to know about how the sex has been with Allura and Ryou lately. Sure, Lance snaps a half-baked apology and he could do better. But Shiro would accept the ostensible lack of contrition if his friend would wait up enough to greet him properly.

Except Lance doesn’t stop until he’s up in Lotor’s personal space, having his hands batted off of Lotor’s shoulders.

“You could have brushed your teeth before trying to touch me,” Lotor sneers.

“Oh my God, Prince Jerkass, I totally _so_ don’t care.” The roll of Lance’s eyes is audible in his voice. When he sighs, his entire body slouches, as if he’s knocked the wind out of his own sails. “Look, it’s cool that you got back safely too, Hunk and Acxa will be happy—” Lance groans as Lotor’s cheeks flush pink. “Oh, shut up with that _Tiger Beat_, teenage dream, blushing, high school crushy bullshit, it doesn’t suit you, okay? It looks terrible. But Lotor, please, I’m begging you: where in the double-cheesing monkey Hell is Shiro?”

Shiro meant to needle Lotor, this time. He’s spent the past two weeks teasing Shiro about finally seeing Keith again. Blushing like that, he handed Shiro the perfect chance for payback. But hearing Lance, Shiro blanks on every snappy retort he might have made.

For his part, Lotor furrows his brow, then blinks at Shiro over Lance’s shoulder. This makes Lance snap his fingers in Lotor’s face, which in turn makes Shiro itch to find the words that might magically fix everything. Wide-eyed, Lotor stares at Lance, wearing a tight, utterly baffled expression that would be mouth open, totally agog gaping on almost anybody else. If he’s that taken aback, then it’s only fair for Shiro to be the one to verbally fix this.

That would, however, require Shiro to remember where his voice has gone and how to make it do things. Some vocabulary would be helpful, too. Certainly more so than the empty space he has between his ears, watching Lance curl a hand around Lotor’s bicep while Lotor is too shocked to fend him off. All that cerebral vacantness accomplishes is making Shiro want to shake himself until he finds the right wire to make his synapses connect again.

“I’m not playing right now, okay,” Lance bursts out, voice edging into desperation. He sounds like he’s fighting off a nervous breakdown, or like he didn’t get midnight showing tickets for _Black Panther_. “Lotor, _please_. Keith’s been completely, totally unbearable. I can’t take it anymore. He’s taking a leak, but I need you to tell me: where the Hell is Shiro.”

“He’s right there?” Lotor nods toward him. “How could you even ask me—”

Without letting go of Lotor, Lance whips around. His eyes dart around the crowd with a gleam to them like he’s actually trying to focus, but he might as well ignore Shiro entirely. Lance spends more time squinting at some burly, Hell’s Angel-looking guy who, aside from being shorter than Shiro and pretty thickly bearded, is in his fifties, at the youngest.

Every time Lance’s gaze lands in the right place, he never lingers on Shiro long. The longest time he pauses on Shiro, Lance wrinkles his nose in scrutiny but seems to see right through his friend. While something catches in his throat, Shiro can’t stop his shoulders from drooping. It’s like he’s slimmed down enough that he’s become invisible. There’s no way Shiro looks _that_ radically different. He’s only had so much trouble in getting used to his new figure because he’s been fat since puberty and everything about his body feels weird, and new, and different. Lance has got to recognize him. Why wouldn’t he?

“Shiro is standing _right there_, Sir Lancelot.” Lotor groans, finally shaking Lance off so he can gesture in Shiro’s direction. “The one in the Emilie Autumn crop-top who you almost knocked over, running in here. With the bleached-out streak up front that we all know and love. Honestly, how could you miss him?”

This, finally, makes Lance pause on Shiro and unsure what else he can do in this situation, Shiro gives Lance a warm, understanding smile. Narrowing his eyes, Lance drags them up and down Shiro’s body, from his beat-up sneakers to the white streak in his hair. When he zeroes in on Shiro’s midsection, Shiro shoves his thumbs through his belt-loops. He shrugs, rocking on the balls of his feet and jutting his hips out at thin air. That movement makes Lance stare even harder at Shiro’s stomach, as if he’s trying to find a hidden picture.

However Lance is taking that—whatever he thinks of Shiro’s abs and how much hip-bone he can see by now—he looks up to Shiro’s face next, tilting his head like one of the confused baby owls on the nature documentary shows that Ryou and Allura love so much. For a moment, Lance’s brown eyes glimmer with something that seems like recognition, like he’s finally getting it through his beautiful head that he is looking right at Shiro.

But he turns back to Lotor, squaring up his shoulders as if he wants to fight. “Ha ha, very funny. You found some poor guy who looks like Shiro’s skinny, ponytailed doppelgänger, and you paid him to stand there and pull my freaking leg—”

“Have you gotten _stupider_ while we’ve been away?” Lotor snaps, his whole face curling up into a sneer. “Or did you sustain a major head injury recently? I ask because I would _hate_ to mock someone suffering from something that puts him at such a disadvantage.”

“You know what I’m suffering from, Prince Loser? I’m _suffering_ from the fact that you let Shiro go off and hide somewhere—”

“He is standing right there!”

“Except for how he clearly isn’t—”

“Why would I lie about that? Especially when I want Keith and Shiro to—”

“I don’t ask _why_ you lie about things, man! I just assume you do—”

“_Lance_, seriously,” Shiro finally manages to bite out.

That makes Lance snap to attention, shoulders stiffening and head perking up like a dog who’s just heard an oncoming mailman. When he turns around again, he looks completely lost, as if someone whanged him on the head and asked him to get through some differential calculus. His mouth curls into a deep frown. Excluding his eyes, which are all but bugging clean out of his skull, he has his whole face crumpled up. Things get no better when Shiro waves _hello_ at him. That only makes Lance gape at him, mouth flopping like a fish who’s dying on dry land.

“Hey, Sharpshooter. Long time, no see?” he offers with a hopeful grin. This earns him a befuddled shake of Lance’s head, and Shiro forces himself to choke down a sigh. “…Come on, do I need to answer a security question for you? Tell you something that only I would know?”

“_Yes_?!” Lance wrinkles his nose like he can’t believe what he just said, but he rebounds pretty quickly: “Yes, man, please. Do that exactly.”

Shiro rubs the bridge of his nose. “Okay, I walked right into that,” he says, so Lance won’t get too antsy while Shiro’s racking his brain for one of his secrets that he can spill in the middle of the baggage claim without completely hating himself come morning. Has to be something that Lance will actually believe him about as well, or something that he can easily fact-check with Lotor, Keith, or Ryou.

“I lost my virginity to George Michael.” Although his cheeks don’t feel like they’re flushing, Shiro can’t look Lance in the eye as he says this. “I mean, to his music. My high school boyfriend did the actual virginity taking, just? His name was Adam; his sister hated me. He was one of my only friends. I’d had a crush on him since fourth grade and I still couldn’t believe we were dating. We got a little buzzed after junior prom because his parents were out of town. I gave him a blow-job, he did me while George Michael’s _Faith_ was playing, and his sister flipped out in the morning. Satisfied?”

Humming, Lance considers it. “Tell me something I would say about you?”

“How is that a security question?” Not that Shiro minds answering, exactly, but it’s the principle of the thing. “You have told me, more than once, that I am the only person you know who likes giving head more than you do. You’ve said it around the entire Gang, I really don’t see—”

“Okay, it’s you! Point made, I got it!”

Lance pauses, almost like he’s going to drop this. Instead, he turns his back on Lotor fully, which gets Lance shoved. Once he’s gotten his footing back, he whines bemusedly. He screws up his face like he really, really wants to use his words, like he’s trying to pull something out of himself to properly express how he’s feeling about this revelation. It seems that it’s Lance’s turn to feel like his brain’s been replaced by cotton candy. For all his attempts at making himself say something, he only comes up with still more lost-sounding, throaty noises.

“I’m gonna need you to translate that if you want to keep this conversation going,” Shiro deadpans with a fond little smirk.

Lance splutters like he’s trying to keep himself from choking on his tongue. “Jesus, what _happened_ to you, man? You’re all like… You went and got …” Waving his hands around in Shiro’s general direction, Lance makes a series of vague gestures that defy a coherent translation into English. He must notice that Shiro’s struggling to keep up this smile, given how he blushes. “Not that it’s _bad_, or like you don’t look _good_, but—”

“But I… grew my hair out? But I… am finally listening to you about letting myself wear crop-tops?” Shiro quirks his shoulders without quite shrugging. None of these suggestions are serious, but maybe getting Lance to laugh will clear up whatever’s making him vibrate with such a palpable case of nerves. “But I’m back, and I’m home, which this is _good_ because you missed me, and—”

“But you completely _shrunk_ in California,” Lance blurts out without so much as a chuckle. “You look like freaking _half_ of you!”

“Close, but? Actually, I’m a little _less_ than half of me?” His lungs twist against his rib-cage like they’re trying to break free, but Shiro can’t tell what he’s feeling guilty about. “I ran the numbers with the doctor I had out in LA before we left. I’m down to about forty-nine-and-a-half percent of my body weight, back when I started? Then, I lost way over half my body fat, like… That’s down to, like, a fifth of what I had before. And I’m forty-two percent of what I used to be, if you wanna look at how big around I am?” Shrugging, Shiro makes himself grin and gestures at his waist. “Only thirty-two inches, man. Can you believe that?”

“But what the Hell _happened_,” Lance pleads, pointy face screwing itself up so tight, it looks like he’s tearing up. “Are you okay?”

Why on Earth is Lance _pleading_ at Shiro like this? Is there a gas leak in the airport? Did a white rabbit push Shiro through a looking glass without him even noticing? Considering Lance isn’t happy about what he’s accomplished, Shiro wouldn’t be surprised to find himself in Wonderland—and that might even make more sense than the way that Lance keeps frowning at him.

Shaking his head, he tries not to let his face fall. “I lost some weight in California, like I told you. That’s literally all that happened—”

“Kind of a _ton_ of weight. Not for nothing, dude, but you look downright _skinny_. And when you were left, you were more, y’know, like…”

Sounding like a puppy who can’t believe you’re making it go outside to pee, Lance waves his hands at Shiro yet again. It’s almost cute, until he traces a much rounder outline in the air. Gesturing at Shiro’s abs, Lance paints an invisible picture of a body that’s rotund and thick, excessively wide, and bulging out absolutely everywhere with chub, like the body Shiro has in every photo on his personal social media accounts. Somehow, Lance’s image still comes up smaller than Shiro used to be. It’s almost like Lance is trying to be slightly more polite about this exercise in tactlessness, like some part of him realizes that he should probably stop before he kicks Shiro too hard in the feelings.

Instead of listening to that impulse, though, he draws increasingly exaggerated patterns that are supposed to represent fat rolls, love-handles, chubby cheeks, a double-chin, and a flabby, sagging belly. As if there could possibly be confusion about what any of this means, Lance mimes a distended gut flopping out from Shiro’s narrow, waspish waist, and he makes a sound like, _“bloomph!”_

Tightening his lips, Shiro plasters on a smile. “Not for _nothing_, Lance? But I’m well aware that I was fat before.”

“You have a thigh-gap now, okay? I’m kinda reeling, Shiro! You came back almost skinnier than Lotor, it’s disorientating!”

“It’s what I got out of working out and eating right. What about me losing weight _confuses_ you—”

“But doing it so _fast_, like? Seriously, dude, are you _sick_ or something—”

“Completely clean bill of health. The worst that’s gone on lately was hold I had a cold at Christmas—”

“One that was _genuinely_ a cold, as well.” Lotor sniffs. “It cleared up before we even hit crunch-time for the Golden Globes—”

“Why did he have to do _crunches_ for an award show you didn’t get to go to. He’s already _got_ an invisible waistline—” 

“He means that we had a lot of prep work to do for the Globes, okay? Our bosses and some of our senior coworkers got to go, even if we didn’t.” Swallowing a groan, Shiro rolls his eyes. “Anyway, how big around are _you_? Twenty-nine inches? _If_ that much?”

“Okay, first thing?” Lance holds up a finger. “Unless Ryou told you in advance, it is fucking _creepy_ how you can _guess_ a thing like that—”

“I got lucky. But my point is: if _my_ waist is invisible, then what the Hell is _yours_?”

“Naturally skinny because I take after my Mama. But _second_ thing?” He holds up another finger and arches his eyebrows like he dares Shiro to interrupt him before he’s said his piece. “Did you use freaking _magic_, dude? Because no judgment if you did. But if you tell _Hunk_ that you slimmed down with diet and exercise when actually, it was magic? I know where you sleep.”

Shiro stops dead before getting out a syllable of his planned retort.

“Dude, _really_,” comes out before he can think of something better to say.

Unfortunately, Lance is making one of his wide-eyed, expectant, earnest faces, so Shiro has to respond, unless he wants to get a headache. He sighs. “How could I have lost the weight with _magic_, Lance. Magic. Isn’t. _Real_.”

“Okay, but how do you _know_ that it’s not real, though—”

“Because _isn’t_. If magic were real, I wouldn’t have let myself get fat in the first place—”

“Just because you didn’t know it was an _option_ doesn’t mean that it’s not _real_, Shiro—”

“No, but the objective rules that govern our _reality_ sure do—”

“We have a disease that makes me cough up pink mountain juniberry flowers and purple gardenias when I feel like your brother or our Princess are ignoring me! Why the Hell can’t we have _magic_!”

“Because we _don’t_, okay? You wanna live in a reality with magic? Go and talk to Sven’s stupid boyfriend—”

“See, you _say_ we don’t have magic in this reality, Shiro? But I’m looking at some pretty damn convincing evidence that says we maybe _do_.” As if his meaning isn’t clearer than a white diamond, Lance gestures at Shiro’s abs again. “And I’m _just saying_, man? If you don’t wanna admit to using magic, _fine_. But be _honest_ about it with _Hunk specifically_ or I will kick your skinny ass.”

“Are you… Do I really look that different?” Shiro’s heart sinks when Lance nods at him and makes a face like this should be obvious. Worse, the indignation seeps right out of him, leaves him feeling hollowed out and struggling not to slouch. “Look, I didn’t use magic, okay? I’m not sick and I didn’t slim down by getting sick. I didn’t use pills, or unhealthy cleanses, or questionably legal _’dietary supplements.’_ I lost the weight through diet and exercise and taking better care of myself, exactly like I said.”

Lance considers this for a moment, then huffs. “Well, I still say it looks drastic enough to be magic.”

“Stop _encouraging_ him, you idiot,” Lotor hisses, backhand slapping Lance’s shoulder. “He has been incorrigible enough about this already—”

“Incorrigible like _how_?” Lance grimaces.

“Incorrigible like insisting that I have a right to do what I want with my own body.” Shiro folds his arms over his chest, tries to smother the impulse that he’s feeling to let himself go slack, start slouching instead of keeping up his decent posture. “Incorrigible like listening to advice about how, if you don’t like something about yourself, then you should take charge and change it—”

“Incorrigible,” Lotor drawls, “like placing far too much value on whether or not he has an _eight-pack_—”

“Wait, do you?” Lance can’t hold back from asking. “I mean, I can see your abs, for sure, but… Are they _really_—”

“You can _count_ his abdominals, genius. I assume that you know how to count without Allura and Ryou showing you the process—”

“Yeah, but we’re in the middle of the airport—”

“Oh, please. He and I were discussing far more obscene things than the current state of his waistline.” Lotor huffs and shakes out his ponytail like a horse swatting away flies. “Darling, tighten up. If Lance is going to be impossible, _please_ just let him count your eight-pack—”

On most other days—even in most other awkward reunion situations that Shiro’s imagined for the past two months—he wouldn’t mind indulging them, in this. At least, he wouldn’t mind enough to stop Lance from counting anything.

Yet, as Lance and Lotor squabble about the relative ethics of examining Shiro’s abs in public places, his nerves flare up over the pressing lack of Keith. He’s happy to see Lance as well, the awkwardness of this notwithstanding. As much as they sometimes clash about their respective, often vastly differing approaches to life, the universe, and everything, Lance is a good friend and Shiro’s missed him more than Lance would probably believe.

But Lance, for all his many virtues and for all Shiro’s life is better with him in it, distinctly is not _Keith_.

Tuning out Lance and Lotor, Shiro turns around, glances up and down the baggage claim, tries to pick out any sign of the person he most wants to see right now. When Keith doesn’t immediately make himself obvious, Shiro turns again. In lieu of any other ideas, he keeps turning. He looks toward one of the restrooms, since Lance mentioned that Keith went there instead of coming straight to Shiro and Lotor.

Still, there’s nothing. More than anything that Lance spit out, Keith’s absence threatens to drag Shiro down into slouching. He knows that he shouldn’t—he may not be fat anymore, but in the back of his mind, he can still hear Mom’s and Ojiisan’s voices chastising him and Ryou about respecting themselves enough to stand up straight—but… Seriously, where the Hell has Keith gone off to?

Dragging himself through another turn, Shiro’s ready to storm off in search of Keith. He makes it two steps, then stops dead. Just barely avoids literally walking right into someone, and babbling apologies, he stumbles three steps backward. Then, a fourth, just for good measure.

Holding out his arms to steady himself, Shiro blinks down at a pair of black combat boots. A pair of black sweatpants are tucked into them, easily hiding the legs beneath them before they disappear under the bottom hem of a baggy, blue-grey, hooded sweatshirt with _Kaltenecker University_ scrawled across the chest in white. The sleeves are rolled back as if they’re too long for whoever’s wearing the shirt and they wanted to maintain some use of their pale hands. Shiro blinks at the shirt for a moment before deciding that there are more important things. Like, for instance, the messy black hair that has a sheen like someone took a shower immediately before getting in the car to come here.

Moreover, there are the wide, indigo-blue eyes, framed with thick, black lashes that can only belong to one person. Currently, he can’t decide whether he wants to look at Shiro’s eyes or at his stomach, but in fairness, that was a reaction that Shiro should’ve seen coming.

Between the way Keith’s hair falls around him and the way he won’t look up, Shiro can’t get a good look at his face—is there something softer about it? Fuller, maybe? It seems like Keith’s cheeks aren’t quite as sharp as they were, the last time Shiro got to see his face on Skype? That was back at the Christmas before last, when Shiro and Lotor couldn’t wriggle out of obligations to an internship they’d scored or scare up enough spare cash to get back home, so it’d make sense that Keith’s face might have changed. _Shiro’s _certainly has, so who is he to judge.

Finally, Keith decides he wants to look at Shiro’s abs. Which Shiro wouldn’t mind—not even enough to make some crack like Lance would do, about how his eyes are up here—except for how Keith’s scrunching up his face as if he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing. Maybe like he doesn’t believe it’s really Shiro, either.

Taking a deep breath, Shiro edges closer and puts a hand on Keith’s shoulder, gives him a gentle squeeze that Shiro prays is reassuring. This isn’t how things were meant to go in this reunion. Even if Shiro can’t find anything clever or moving to say, he and Keith shouldn’t be so deathly quiet with each other. Keith shouldn’t be making a face like he might be disappointed with this reunion or worse, with Shiro.

Shiro opens his mouth to say something, he has no idea what. It doesn’t matter, though. Warm hands spread themselves along his stomach. As Keith digs in his fingertips, Shiro’s mind goes blank and his vocabulary completely disappears. His whole face flushes hot. That feeling spills down his neck as Keith palms up and down his abs, his sides, his hips. His hands rove all over Shiro’s torso without any rhyme or reason to where he plants them, where he chooses to linger or not. If Keith would let Shiro have a better look at his face… If Shiro knew how to best interpret what little bit he _can_ see of Keith’s inscrutable expression…

Somewhere in Shiro’s periphery, somebody coughs so loudly, so _deliberately_, that he almost jumps. Almost starts throwing out half-hearted apologies for letting Keith feel him up in the middle of the baggage claim. Keith touching him is the only reason Shiro doesn’t make any sudden movements. Something thick and sticky wells up in the back of Shiro’s throat as Keith squeezes his hip, runs a thumb along the bone. He swallows thickly, lets his tongue dart out along his lips, even as his rational mind screams at him to reach in his hip pocket and put on his lip-chap or he’ll only make the situation worse.

Part of him wants to push back into Keith’s hands, wants to give Keith more access to his body—_who cares that we’re in public or that people can see us, it’s been too long, I need this _—but some different part of him yells that they should stop this, stop it now—

Pursing his lips, Shiro glances at the ceiling, tries to think about anything but how many times he’s imagined something like this. How many times he used to tell himself things like, _“As soon as I slim down again, I’ll be allowed to let him touch me like a boyfriend and everything will be pretty close to perfect” _and, _“I’m going to ask him how he feels about me, right after my next diet, I just need to get my abs back so I can be good enough for Keith, be the guy who Keith deserves…”_

But now that the moment’s here? Now that this thing he’s wished for is finally, truly, undeniably here, smacking Shiro in the face like whacking a disobedient dog with a rolled up newspaper? Shiro has no idea what he wants to do, or what he should do, or what any of this means or doesn’t—

Next thing he knows, none of that even matters. Keith flings his arms around Shiro’s chest. He doesn’t even struggle to get them all the way around him. With no hesitation, Keith tugs himself and Shiro into a tight hug. This part, Shiro doesn’t need to think about. Not even a little. He wraps his arms around Keith’s shoulders, pulls him in closer still, as if they can find a way to overpower and rewrite the laws of physics. As if sheer desire for this kind of closeness will somehow erase the boundaries between their bodies.

With a soft, whimpering noise, Keith noses at Shiro’s neck. He sighs against Shiro’s collarbone, then rubs his cheek on one of Shiro’s pecs. It feels like the moments when Shiro’s ever gone upstairs to Allura, Lance, and Ryou’s place, and Blue—the cat that Allura and Lance have had since before finding a third partner in Shiro’s seven-minutes-younger brother—decided to rub her face all over the three of them, trying to make it completely crystal clear that she has the standing claim on her three humans. If that’s even remotely close to what Keith is going for, then Shiro doesn’t think he minds.

He minds the fact that he still can’t relocate his ability to use words like a semi-functional adult. But Keith squeezes Shiro’s chest as if he doesn’t care. As if nothing in the world matters more than having Shiro here with him again, not even hearing confirmation that he isn’t the only one of them who’s needed this. Even if Keith doesn’t need to hear how much this means to Shiro, Shiro needs to tell him so. He needs to find _something_ he can say because even after getting adopted by Antok and Kolivan, even with The Gang serving as a ragtag makeshift family, Keith’s life is desperately short on love and Shiro _can’t_ let him feel like he’s unimportant—

“It’s good to have you back,” Keith tells him before Shiro’s even come up with half-a-sentence, softly enough that only Shiro hears him.

Dimly, he wonders if Keith feels thicker in his arms, or possibly a little softer? Maybe he does? But it could just be the extra padding in the sweatshirt, or the fact that Shiro hasn’t hugged Keith in far too long. It could be that he’s extra-sensitive to Keith’s body right now because there’s so much less of his own.

Whatever the explanation, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is burying face in Keith’s soft, slightly damp hair and the mixed up, fruity-but-spicy scent that Shiro can only name as _Keith’s shampoo_.

As Keith burrows deeper into Shiro’s chest, Shiro manages to whisper, “It’s good to be back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including:
> 
>   * Short comments
>   * Long comments
>   * Questions
>   * Personal reactions/interpretations
>   * “<3” as extra kudos
>   * Reader-reader interaction
>   * Comments made with the [LLF Comment Builder](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/post/170952243543/now-presenting-the-llf-comment-builder-beta).
> 
> The author reads and appreciates all comments, and gets back to all of them eventually, but may be slow to reply due to trying to rein in the ADHD/anxiety cocktail.
> 
> If, for any reason, you don’t want to receive a reply, just put, “whisper” near the start of your comment, and I’ll appreciate it without replying.


	2. Chapter 2

There’s a lot to be said in favor of packing light, but on the way back to the car, Keith’s grateful that there’s so much junk to haul around. Getting everything out to the parking garage, Keith can focus on dragging one of Shiro’s heavy suitcases, trying not to run afoul of any taxi cabs or jackasses who don't remember that pedestrians have the right of way. Loading everything up in the trunk, Keith can give his full attention to finding the most effective arrangement of luggage and telling Shiro where to put things.

Settling into the backseat, though, Keith finds himself at a loss for what to do about literally anything.

Since Lance is driving and Lotor calls shotgun, Shiro sits at the other end of the backseat. But he isn’t attached to Keith’s side, the way Keith had hoped for. Dragging his hand back through some of the hair that he hasn’t tamed into a ponytail, Shiro leans against the opposite window. With a soft sigh, he shuts his eyes. While Lance fumbles about paying for their time in the parking garage, Shiro purses his lips in the way that means he’s anxious, lying, or feeling like he might throw up even worse than Hunk when somebody mentions roller-coasters. Keith has to fight off the impulse to roll his eyes and it isn’t easy.

The worst part is, Keith shouldn’t even feel exasperated over anything right now, least of all the familiarity of Shiro’s discomfort riding in cars. He’s fine when he’s driving, but not when he has to let other people take the wheel. Sitting in the back means having his legs cramped up tighter than he likes, exacerbated by the fact that he’s sitting behind Lotor, who has some of the longest legs Keith has ever seen in his life. On top of that, Shiro gets nauseated more easily when he isn’t riding shotgun. According to Ryou and Ulaz, it’s an issue of control for him. Supposedly, there’s more physical upset in the backseat, and Shiro feels the lack of control all the more acutely when he’s further from the steering wheel.

Considering that Lotor damn well knows this, either he had a _really_ bad flight or Shiro must’ve _really_ done something to piss him off.

Considering the abs Keith was publicly feeling up not twenty minutes ago, it’s not hard to guess what that something might have been.

Huffing so quietly that no one seems to notice, Keith hugs himself and slouches against his own window, wedges his shoulder against the door. He doesn’t get carsick himself and, even after using some of Allura’s melatonin so he could sleep last night, Keith doesn’t feel too terribly tired.

But adjusting his posture like this makes Keith’s soft, pudgy belly squish around in a way he can’t ignore. It pooches out toward his lap when he leans forward, and when he finally gets himself comfortable, the outward curve’s still there—just like the chub Keith’s accumulated around his hips and the now-plump insides of his thighs—reminding Keith of how much heavier he got while Shiro was away. If Keith hadn’t borrowed this sweatshirt from Hunk, Shiro and Lotor could probably tell that too. Granted, Keith _wanted_ to hide his tummy and his hips for the initial part of his and Shiro’s reunion.

He hadn’t meant to keep them concealed after their _“welcome home”_ hug, though.

Naturally, he’d planned for there to be a hug, because he and Shiro went too long without one. Had things stuck to Keith’s ideal itinerary, he would have taken off the sweatshirt and let Shiro get a good look of his filled-out, doughy midsection. He would’ve let it last for as long as Shiro liked, and fought anyone who tried to interrupt. Patience normally isn’t in his wheelhouse, but Keith would’ve saved lifting up his shirt and showing off his thighs for the safety and privacy of their apartment. Even if Shiro isn’t ready to admit to how they really feel about each other, Keith _knows_ what sort of kinky shit his best friend wants to pretend he isn’t into.

Gaining weight wasn’t something that Keith did _for_ Shiro, but something he knew Shiro wouldn’t object to happening. All the same, though, Keith would’ve spared him any mortifying public boners. He would’ve kept himself in check and only let Shiro see his chunky thighs and ass when they’d gotten away from the strangers who might’ve made Shiro nervous. When they got around to shooting one of Keith’s clips, the way that they’re still doing later, then Shiro wouldn’t have needed to come on-screen because being in front of the camera makes his skin crawl.

In theory, it was a nearly perfect plan. Just enough wiggle room for Keith to improvise and adapt to the situation as new things came up. Enough space for Shiro to choose between keeping his kinky “secrets” for another afternoon or, if he felt sufficiently comfortable, “revealing” that his kinks aren’t limited to the tacky, BDSM bodice-rippers on his bookshelves. Enough openings for the two of them to talk about being completely arse over teakettle in love with each other, or for them to save it for a time when Shiro _hasn’t_ just gotten off an exhausting red-eye flight.

Except that, apparently, Keith failed to properly account for the Shiro of this situation.

While Shiro has his eyes closed and can’t notice that he’s being glared at, Keith takes the chance to scowl at Shiro’s middle. With his jacket in the way, Keith can’t give a stink-eye to the abs that Shiro decided to show off. That’s probably for the best, though. Keith can’t shake the image of them from his head. Even worse, he can’t decide how he feels about them in the slightest. Too many different feelings and opinions racket around his head and chest, all vying for Keith’s attention, yelling for him to give them precedence over all the other things that he could think about this situation.

At the first red light, Lance eases the car into a stop with a gentleness that he didn’t bother using when it was just him and Keith in the car. God, Keith should appreciate that without any question. He should accept that Lance is likely being extra-careful for Shiro’s sake and let things go _without_ feeling like there’s something amiss that won’t let Keith put his finger in the vicinity of identifying it. Giving Shiro comfort, even if it’s simply trying to drive in a way that’s less likely to make him carsick, is a _good_ thing.

Keith shouldn’t be getting cranky about anything just because Shiro came back from California with a fucking eight-pack. By all rights, he should be _happy_ about the fact that Shiro’s finally succeeded in losing weight like he’s wanted to do for years. He’s been fat for so long that Keith barely remembers what Shiro looked like before Ojiisan first got sick. Lance and their friends have literally never seen Shiro thin, outside of old Shirogane family photos. It must have taken an absurd amount of hard work for Shiro to slim down at all, much less get abs like this.

Yet, when Keith leans his head back against the seat, he can’t miss the way his stomach turns, threatening to make him puke.

He can’t that Lance is eyeing him in the rear-view mirror, either. Even with so much time as friends—even with how much work they had to put into learning their ways around some of each other’s tics—it takes Keith a moment’s pause to remember that Lance _probably_ isn’t pitying him when he twists his brow up like that. In all likelihood, Lance is confused about what Shiro’s dropped into their laps. More than that, he probably wants to check in on how Keith’s doing and extend some sympathy. He might not be able to full-on read Keith’s thoughts, but Lance cares so very deeply, despite sometimes coming on too strong. Plus, he has a pretty accurate sense when his friends might need a bit of extra TLC.

Turning down some Imagine Dragons song that Keith’s heard three time already since dragging himself off of Allura, Lance, and Ryou’s sofa, Lance gently clears his throat. It makes Lotor hum pensively, and gets Shiro to lift his head off the window. But neither of them says anything, which makes Lance sigh.

“_Sooooo_…” he says. “How was California? You guys didn’t call for us to come save you, so I’m guessing fun—”

“Oh, it certainly has its charms,” Lotor offers, keeping his voice pointedly casual. “I rather enjoyed hosting backers’ parties for the studio we interned at.”

To Lance’s credit, he resists the urge to respond like he would to any normal gossip. In the rear-view, Keith sees the way Lance licks his lips, the way his eyes glimmer as if he’s denying himself ice cream in the middle of July. But he doesn’t give in to his impulses, and that’s for the best. Most people would probably buy that Lotor’s about as interested in whatever story he means to share as he would be in a hypothetical weather report. Keith, however, trusts this tone as much as he trusts Lance’s skills with math. Obviously, there’s something going on.

Flipping his cowlick off his face, Lotor sighs. “They are actually quite nice affairs. Until my parents turned up at one unexpectedly—”

“Wait a second,” Lance snaps, not cruelly but certainly lacking in anything adjacent to tact or composure. “I thought your parents lived in Chicago.”

“They do,” says Lotor. “But they also have an estate in Calabasas. Had they been on any of the invitee lists that our bosses showed us, Shiro and I could have prepared for such an encounter. However, my Mother and Father came as guests of a backer who did not know that his business associates even _had_ a son other than Sincline. Much less that said disowned, gay, alleged train-wreck son is a filmmaker, or that I was working for that studio. None of us had reason to think that we might see each other—”

“And then Zarkon and Honerva were themselves, which is to say, ‘Completely awful.’ So, we wound up making a sad McDonald’s run at three in the morning.” Shiro rolls his eyes at the skeptical noise from Lance. “Look, he wanted McNuggets but after the party, he got too drunk to hit the drive-through by himself. What was I gonna say in that situation? ‘No, Lotor, you _can’t_ have this little bit of comfort that pales in comparison to having a run-in with your abusive, freak show parents’? Honestly, what kind of heartless _monster _would I have to be—”

“I didn’t say that!” Thankfully, Lance keeps his eyes on the road while sticking up for himself. “I wasn’t even thinking that or anything like it, okay? I just meant… You came home looking how you look, so… Y’know, the McDonald’s of it all seemed kinda incongressional? …Incredulitous? …Mullet, help, what’s the word I’m looking for?”

Keith thumps his head against his window over the way that Lance is playing dumb. “‘Incongruous,’ probably?”

“Yes, exactly! Thank you! ‘Cause not for nothing, Shiro? But it looks like you haven’t touched McDonald’s in at least ten months.”

Shiro shrugs. He swallows a yawn. Ruffling his black fringe, he supposes, “In-N-Out is better.”

“Also, the fact that he drove me to get McNuggets does not mean that he ate any himself.” Glancing in Keith’s general direction, Lotor adds, “For the record, though? He ate McDonald’s for breakfast.”

“_Please_ don’t start.” Sighing, Shiro pinches the bridge of his nose. “And, Lance? I realize that this is probably pointless, because you like talking to people and can’t always keep track of your mouth? But certain things that might seem like hot topics may not really… Can you maybe…”

He pauses, face twisting up in the expression that means he’s debating himself about his potential choice of words.

Lotor groans. “Darling, quit digging for an equivocation. Respect us and say what you mean.”

“The weight loss, _okay_?” As soon as it bursts out of Shiro, his shoulders hunch and his cheeks flush pink. He scrubs underneath one eye, smearing his concealer and revealing a hint of the dark rings he tried to hide. “Don’t tell anyone that I lost weight in California, Lance. Can you _please_ do me this one favor and hold your tongue about that until dinner?”

“Dude, what about talking to your _brother_?” Lance pales and goes wide-eyed, as if Shiro casually mentioned wanting to jump off the nearest bridge. “Why don’t you want him to know? Like, did something happen between you guys—”

“Ryou already kinda knows about it.” This earns Shiro another round of scoffing like Lance has several complaints to register, so he explains, “He’s known since around our last birthday. Aunt Satomi and Naoko came down from Rancho for a long weekend visit. I’d already lost about a hundred-and-fifteen pounds, at that point? Gotten down to about three-twenty, and honestly, I couldn’t quite believe I had—”

“What about Christmas, though?” Lance wrinkles his nose. “They would’ve seen you _then_, right? ‘cause they didn’t come out here—”

“They went to see some friends in London,” Shiro tells him evenly. “Lotor and I spent the day by ourselves. Watching Christmas movies, batting around some ideas for our screenplay, arguing about whether or not I wanted to have a cheat day, and whether or not I wanted any of the treats from Hunk’s care package—”

Lotor scoffs. “Arguments that I gave my all and still _resoundingly_ lost—”

“Then apologizing and cuddling to _A Charlie Brown Christmas_ because we were both lonely, and miserable, and just…” Shiro doesn’t even sigh as his head droops back against the seat. He just goes limp and the color drains out of his cheeks. “Really made us wonder whether or not the connections and recommendation letters were worth it. Sure, they could help, but…”

“Help us though they might, they do not replace people of import in our lives,” Lotor says, going soft enough that Lance shoots a concerned frown in _his _direction, rather than Shiro’s. “Worse yet, our bosses didn’t call upon us for anything, after enlisting us to be on-call for both of these past Christmases. So, we sacrificed our holidays for nothing—”

“At least we had Naoko and Satomi with us this past—”

“Okay, but what about _Ryou_?” Lance’s voice goes tight, like he _knows_ these two are jerking him around to get out of answering his actual question. “Y’know, Ryou, your _brother_? Who you were supposed to be telling me about with the whole… All of this?”

Lifting his head, Shiro shrugs. “There’s not much to tell, honestly,” he says as though he actually believes that. “So, like I said, I was down to around three-hundred-twenty. Still fat, but smaller than I’d been since my _Grandfather_ was still alive. And it probably looked like I’d lost more weight than that because of me working out and taking better care of myself—”

“_Yes_, darling. Because dropping one hundred-and-fifteen pounds in slightly over eight months is a truly minuscule accomplishment that _no one_ who loves you would have noticed otherwise.”

Vaguely, Keith wants to smack Lotor for saying exactly what Keith himself thinks about Shiro’s fucking diet. Somewhat less vaguely, Keith wants to punch Lotor for acting like he isn’t partially responsible for this unadulterated bullshit situation. But both of those options would probably startle Lance and make him crash the car, and then all four of them would likely die. So for now, Keith curls one leg up to his chest and silently picks at his nails.

Shiro frowns at him for a moment, but then goes on: “Anyway, first of all, Aunt Satomi asks Lotor if I’m taking cocaine or crystal meth—”

“Which I categorically denied and refuted—”

“_Then_ she asks if I’m a ridiculous crash diet again, waiting for it to backfire—”

“Which I also denied and refuted, thanks to those meticulous appointment notes from your doctor and nutritionist—”

“_Then _she asks if I’m down with wasting disease levels of Hanahaki or something—”

“As though such things actually happen to anyone outside of opera, melodramas, Gothic fiction, and your trashy bodice rippers.”

“Then _finally_, she just gives up and calls Ryou. As if he has firsthand knowledge of _literally anything_ when he’s on the other side of the freaking _country_.” Shiro bristles uncomfortably and squirms around his seat. Keith can’t tell if Shiro’s genuinely upset or if he’s being petulant, but right now, both options sound equally likely. “Only I don’t find out that she called Ryou until he calls and yells at me. Then, once he’s done _yelling_, we progress to him interrogating me about what I think I’m doing, taking in absolutely _nothing_ that I say, and ripping into me like I’m guilty until proven innocent—”

“Because your _brother_—your twin and _only_ brother, who loves you quite ferociously? Clearly, he has no reason whatsoever to _worry_ about your well-being.” Drumming his long, thin fingers on his bicep, Lotor does a decent job of sounding nonchalant. Keith would buy it if he didn’t _know_ that Lotor has a twin brother too, and that Sincline’s almost as bad as their freak show parents. “I mean, honestly, darling, what_ever_ was Ryou thinking. It’s hardly as though you’ve tried to survive on coffee, eggs, and grapefruit before. Or lied about having eaten so that you could get away with skipping meals. Or exhibited other blatantly unhealthy behaviors and acted as though your previous _weight_ made them—”

“I didn’t _say_ that Ryou had no reason for concern about me, Barbie. I _said_ that he went into that phone call with certain assumptions that I didn’t appreciate, and that he didn’t want to _listen_.” Shiro sighs like he’d prefer not to go into the rest of the specific, gory-sounding details of that conversation with his brother. Throwing a long, sad look at the back of Lance’s head, he says, “Ryou didn’t tell you and Allura what I’ve been doing because I asked him not to. Which he didn’t appreciate and tried to argue against, so please don’t be mad at him—”

“I wasn’t _gonna_,” Lance grouses with the air of a man who can’t believe that his basically-brother-in-law would imply such a stupid thing about him. “But, dude, really? Are you really sure that I can’t tell anybody? I mean, is that actually a good idea? You _seriously_ don’t look like yourself. I mean, hashtag ‘#Not My Shiro’?”

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Grimacing, Shiro swallows thickly. “I’m _still me_, Lance. Aside from making me _happier_, getting abs doesn’t mean that I’m not your Shiro. Or not the same Shiro that I was eighteen months ago. They’re what’s on the surface. I’m still _me_.”

“Yeah, I know, but come _on_. You’ve gotta admit, you look _really_ different—”

“I guess I’ve had more time to adjust to it or something? Because I didn’t think it was _that_ big a deal.”

“Anyway, why the change in tune, so much? How can you ask me to keep this quiet when you’re sitting here in a crop-top, flaunting your abs and looking like you’re on your way to go shoot, I don’t know? Your own tastefully sexy _pin-up calendar_—”

“I wasn’t fishing for that—”

“No, but you _wanted_ to hear it,” Lotor points out. “Accept the compliment graciously or I will hot-glue your favorite boots to the floor of your apartment.”

“The fuck you will,” Keith snaps. “I’ll make you clean it up with your bare hands and a toothbrush.”

“Mmm, yes, _Sir_,” purrs Lotor in a way that makes Shiro go pale while Keith’s stuck flushing scarlet. Fortunately, he gives his attention back to Lance in short order. “Since our dear Takashi will most likely never say this for himself? He wants to surprise The Gang with how he has quite literally worked his ass off in the past year-and-a-half. He intends to show up for dinner in a super-tight shirt and jeans that show off everything but his dick, so that everyone can see how he looks now that he has lost _so much_ weight—”

“But he doesn’t even _look like himself_!” Lance slams the heel of his palm against the steering wheel—but at least he apologizes when Keith and Lotor flinch. Hunching his shoulders like a grumpy cat, he adds on, “I mean? Sure, he kinda _does_ still look like him? I mean, he’s got those telltale, knockout gray eyes and that annoyingly perfect smile, but? I didn’t freaking recognize him, at first. Keith had to cop a feel or twelve, and he probably thought he was hallucinating those abs. And can you even _blame_ us for that, either—”

“There are several things for which I would gladly blame you, Lance, regardless of whether or not you particularly deserved it.” With a stray, mock-pensive noise, Lotor flips his stupid cowlick off his face. “But as for your actual question: no. I do not blame you for how you reacted at the airport. He is flaunting his abdominals because he thought that showing up like this would be a _fun surprise_ for you and Keith—”

“Why the Hell would he think that? Okay, I’m a connoisseur of hotness and I’ll admit that he looks good. But come _on_!” Lance whines like he wishes that everyone would just agree with him already. “Shiro looks totally quiznakking _weird_ like this, all skinny and shit. He looks all _tiny_ and _deflated_, right? He looks like he’s so sick, it’s a miracle he’s even walking by himself. He looks like he could pass out at any second ‘cause he hasn’t eaten solid food for, like, a _month_—”

“_He_ is sitting right here,” Shiro mutters. “And _he_ can hear both of you pretty perfectly—”

“_He_ also wishes for the chance to peacock slightly,” Lotor continues with a sigh. Every word drips with an exhausted sarcasm that he has no right to use about any of this, as far as Keith’s concerned. “The purpose of this being not to attract a mate, but to show off. To dazzle and amaze everyone in The Gang with his transformation. To impress our friends with how he has emerged as a beautiful butterfly from his imprisonment in a blubbery, flabby, and utterly disgusting chrysalis—”

Keith snorts derisively before he can think better of it. At the moment, he doesn’t care that it’s rude. This entire thing sounds stupid.

They’re at another red light, so Lotor turns to glare at Keith. “Those are _his _words. Not mine.”

“I think everyone in this car knows what sort of words you would use instead.” Shiro rubs at his temple, apparently unconcerned with how he’s smearing secondhand concealer on it. “More importantly: how many times have I asked you to stop reading my journals?”

Lotor’s shrug is limp, and so is the roll of his eyes. “How many times have I asked you to stop leaving them open in common spaces? Especially when you fill them with deeply concerning amounts of self-aimed fat-shaming and then get upset with me for worrying about you?”

“I am _upset_ about the repeated invasion of my privacy—”

“Maybe so. But you are more upset that I don’t curb my tongue about what parts I read—”

“Maybe my private, emotional venting isn’t any of your business unless I make it—”

“Someone I care about harbors intense self-loathing and does not see this as important. In what way is that _not_ my business?”

“Lotor, _please_ sit down before we get pulled over.” Lance groans in the exact right way to grate on Keith’s nerves like sandpaper, but it’s fair enough. Lotor’s being obnoxious and the light’s turned green. Lance is perfectly within his rights to get exasperated.

Although Lotor sits, he can’t resist adding, “But by all means, darling: continue being angry with me. How very dare I show concern for the well-being of one of the only people who has ever been truly _kind_ to me—”

“Can you please quit trying to guilt-trip me for having _feelings_?” Hugging himself, Shiro slumps against his window with a dull, soft thud. “I feel like you might not _really_ be upset about me wanting to have abs instead of love-handles. I also feel like, if what I want for my body is bothering you this much? You should suck it up and tell Hunk how you feel about him, instead of taking your self-induced romantic and sexual frustration out on _me_.”

That gets Lotor to pause and Keith almost feels grateful for that. Watching the way Lotor blushes and hunches in around himself, Keith almost lets himself enjoy a smirk at the prick’s expense. He deserves to feel embarrassed, so why not let him stew in it for a while?

Maybe it’s not entirely Lotor’s fault that Shiro looks the way he does. Maybe Shiro’s been trying to drop weight since before he and Lotor ever dated. But until now, Shiro’s never managed to lose that much weight or keep going for too long. Every diet that he’s inflicted on himself before this one has failed, not least since _Shiro_ is the only person in The Gang who thinks his “diets” were anything but stupid and unhealthy. Maybe Lotor was telling the truth about Shiro having a doctor and nutritionist—but until he proves it, the only change in circumstance that Keith can see is how Shiro and Lotor were alone out west.

It’s pretty simple logic to work out. _Obviously_, Lotor bears part of the responsibility for Shiro thinning out like this.

Keith sighs, because no one’s listening to him right now anyway. No one’s saying anything while Lotor struggles to recompose himself, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. If not for the drone of the road passing by outside the window, the only sounds at all would be everybody’s breathing and the faint strains of Britney’s “Toxic” playing on the radio. But no one’s paying any mind to Keith, as far as he can tell, so who cares if he sighs? Shiro certainly doesn’t look away from his window at the sound of it. He keeps his head tilted so that he could be looking at Lotor or he could be looking at the other cars, but whatever he’s looking at, it definitely isn’t Keith.

Perching his chin on his knee—trying not to let himself dwell too much on the way his stomach presses against his thigh, or the squish he has around his jawline, since those things might shake up his resolve—Keith narrows his eyes at the back of Lance’s head.

Not that any of this is Lance’s fault. If anything, he’s handling the situation remarkably well. Squawking at Shiro without crashing the car is likely taking a lot out of Lance, more so than maintaining any semblance of composure generally does. Keith has a video to shoot this afternoon, so he can’t get Lance any treats just yet, but even so. He’ll need to do something nice for Lance, since he’s being such a good friend to everyone and also driving.

Finally, over-top of a song Keith doesn’t recognize, Lotor clears his throat. “I do not deny what you’ve accused me of, darling,” he says with the care of someone trying not to destroy a Faberge egg. “My feelings for Hunk exist and the unresolved nature of them _may_ somewhat affect my engagement with other people. Considering my established preference for men of ample size, I might have done things that caused you some discomfort when I did not intend—”

“There isn’t any _might have_ about it, Lotor.” Shiro points out, digging his fingertips into his temple. “I’ve asked you to stop taking cheap shots at my weight loss, or making cracks about how you think that I’m too skinny. Most of the time, they aren’t even that bad, because I like it when you’re snarky. I just want you to dial it back a little about this _one thing_. You keep _not _doing that. I don’t think I’m really asking for a lot—”

“You are not. That request is perfectly reasonable, and I _should_ have respected it better.” Lotor pauses after saying this, glancing at Keith and Lance as if he _knows_ that he risked giving them both heart attacks by being so agreeable. “_However_,” he adds, “I do not feel that my perspective on the matter of your self-image has been adequately listened to, and I have not felt like that since this _started_.”

“Okay, to paraphrase you, yourself? I listened to you. I have _been_ listening to you. I just don’t agree with what you—”

“Uh, hey?” Lance pipes up, voice tightening again. He’s looking up in the rear-view mirror, twisting his lips and eyebrows up into one of his impossibly sympathetic expressions, the kind that some part of Keith will probably never entirely understand. “Look, let’s not fight, okay? I promise not to ruin Shiro’s moment by telling anybody else how he got abs in California—”

Shiro mutters, “Thank you—”

“But right about now? It sounds like the two of you need some _nap-time_, so I think we should collectively shut up. Besides…” Lance jerks his thumb in Keith’s direction. “Mighty Mullet back there looks like he’s gonna puke if you two keep going. Let’s be nice and give him a break.”

Keith doesn’t feel carsick. He hasn’t gotten any kind of motion-sickness since his and Shiro’s teenage trip to Six Flags, the one where Keith ate too much cotton-candy and not enough _real_ food before getting on a roller-coaster. Even so, he’s impossibly grateful for Lance right now. Somehow, Keith’s gonna find a way to thank him for being so fucking sensible and putting a pin in this god-awful conversation.


	3. Chapter 3

After they haul Shiro’s stuff up to their apartment and he’s washed the concealer off his face, he could probably stand to unpack like the reasonable adult so many people think he is. At the very least, he should get his laundry out so it’s ready for the wash tomorrow. Keith has two consecutive days off from the bookshop; he knows better than to skip on doing laundry.

Then again, unpacking might easily become A Process. There’s probably a lot of stuff in his dressers and his closet that he’ll want to sort through and sell or donate. Old shirts that he hung onto, even as he kept gaining weight and steadily outgrowing them. Old jeans that, before he left for USC, he hadn’t worn in years but still kept in cardboard boxes—when he wasn’t pinning them to his wall with thumbtacks and torturing himself. Old clothes of all kinds that Shiro refused to let go of because, stubborn bastard that he is, he wouldn’t hear any two ways about the statistical likelihood of him ever fitting into them again.

Either way, he makes everything a moot point as soon as he sees his room. Keith’s kept it reasonably clean for him, just put fresh sheets on the bed last night, and something about this makes Shiro’s grey eyes glimmer like the bed is a literal oasis. Or maybe like he has some kind of plan in mind, like the devious ones he used to pull out when they were kids and he got too bored for his own good. Smiling, Shiro gives Keith a warm, _“Thank you” _and shuffles away without even pausing to squeeze Keith’s shoulder. That’s kinda their _Thing_, so he must be exhausted, if he’s skipping it.

When he hits the mattress, whatever rush of energy kept him on his toes and arguing with Lotor disappears. For once, Shiro seems like he might nod off quickly, no worries about his recurring insomnia or his nightmares. Watching Shiro as he tries to get comfortable, Keith gets the distinct impression that he’s only keeping himself awake long enough to ask that Keith please not let him sleep all day.

“’m gonna help you with your video, since I’m back,” he says, curling up on his side and burrowing underneath the comforter and the black afghan that Obaasan crocheted for him. Eyelids drooping, he yawns and combs a hand back through his hair. “Don’t wanna throw off my schedule too much, either… Plus, I need to call Ulaz. Make sure I can get an appointment with him soon—”

“Just get some rest, Pretty Boy,” Keith tells him softly, leaning against Shiro’s doorway. “We can handle everything else later.”

With that permission, Shiro sighs and shuts his eyes. Keith shouldn’t linger in the threshold, because watching Shiro sleep is about eleven different shades of creepy. Instead, he paces around the kitchen until he makes out the faint, overly polite sound of Shiro’s snoring.

God, Keith’s chest flushes warm, hearing that. In an ideal version of today, he could easily wait here until Shiro wakes up, busying himself with other things so he wouldn’t totally be eavesdropping on Shiro’s nap, but taking comfort in the fact that Shiro’s back where he belongs. Regardless of his abs and what they might or might not signify, he’s _home_. Shiro being home means that Keith is finally home as well, even though he didn’t go anywhere.

But today is not an ideal version of itself. Today, Keith doesn’t get to have that kind of luxury.

Once he’s sure that Shiro won’t hear him leaving, Keith tugs on his boots and his (fairly new) red winter coat. The weight he’s gained makes the extra layer feel a little unnecessary when Keith’s still wearing Hunk’s old sweatshirt. As soon as he hits the pavement, though, a breeze blows and it’s like having icicle talons dragged across his face. Grumbling, Keith pulls up his jacket’s hood and stomps off down the block. Winter, if you ask Keith, can seriously go fuck itself.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take long to reach the place that Lotor shares with Acxa, Ezor, Narti, and Zethrid. Between the five of them, even considering how Lotor’s parents cut him off five years ago, they manage to rent a pretty nice little house, instead of a decent apartment like everybody else in The Gang. Tromping up the driveway, Keith dodges around Acxa's car and a snowman whose stick-arms point toward a comically oversized, erect cock (one of Ezor’s creations, most likely). As he rings the doorbell, Keith wishes he’d paid better attention to the tracks in the snow because he doesn’t really want to deal with Ezor right now. The conversation he actually means to have is gonna be difficult enough.

As if the universe is throwing him a bone, Zethrid opens up the door. Keith actually lets himself smile when he sees her. Not that he _wants_ to play favorites with the Fab Four Gal Pals. Not that anyone would _let_ him when he’s had Hanahaki flare-ups for all four of them _and_ over Lotor, so the question of favoritism might be kind of a moot point.

Still, if Keith did feel like playing favorites with them, there’d be no question because Zethrid absolutely _is_ his favorite. Broad-shouldered and taller than anybody else Keith knows, she easily fills the threshold, slouching on the door-frame and stretching one of her thickly-muscled arms so she can grab the other edge. Ruffling a huge hand over her short, violently pink hair, she grins like she doesn’t know that Keith can limbo under her elbow pretty easily.

“What d’you need, Little Man?” She chuckles. “Selling magazine subscriptions for your high school fundraiser? Girl Scout Cookies for your baby sister?”

“I come seeking an audience with Lotor the Ridiculously Unbearable, Lord of Douchebag Castle, Marquis of the Insufferable Pretentious Garbage Dump, and Crown Prince of Asshole Land,” Keith deadpans with a shrug. “I mean, assuming his philosophy of red-eye flight aftercare hasn’t changed recently.”

In another burst of luck, Lotor’s so-called philosophy remains the same as ever. Zethrid leads Keith back to their kitchen—pausing only so she can pick up Cova, who glares at Keith with their longstanding mutual dislike—and Lotor’s right there, hunched over on the table, nursing what appears to be a beer-stein. When he squints, Keith spots faded words that spell out _Hofbräuhaus am Platzl _up by the glass’s rim and _München, Deutschland_ toward the bottom. Stripped of most of his earlier outfit, Lotor’s only kept the weathered Siouxsie and the Banshees t-shirt. He’s traded his jeans for a pair of blue-and-pink-and-orange plaid flannel pajama shorts that might actually be Acxa’s.

When Zethrid knocks on the wall and asks him to look alive, Lotor briefly perks up, slips right into faking one of his ever-so-charming oil spill smiles. It melts into a halfhearted grimace as soon as he sees Keith.

“Zethrid, we went over this when I called last night,” he drawls.

Easing himself up with the grace of an intoxicated baby deer who hasn’t learned to walk, he shambles to the coffee-pot. Unperturbed by the way he’s being stared at, Lotor dumps the remaining coffee into his beer-stein, then starts cleaning out the pot with a rag.

Wrinkling his nose, he narrows his eyes at Keith, then at Zethrid, and clarifies, “I distinctly remember telling you that Cova is more than enough to deal with on his own. We aren’t adopting any new pets.”

“I’m not _here_ to be your fucking pet, jackass,” Keith snaps. “I’m here because we need to _talk_. Right now. About Shiro.”

Sighing in preemptive exasperation, Lotor allows himself to slouch. “Zethrid, might Keith and I have some privacy? As much as I would rather have you in here than him—”

“_‘Shiro’ _is all the explanation I need, Prince Ballerina Barbie.” On her way out, Zethrid pauses to pat Keith’s shoulder. “Call me if you need anything. Or if he starts getting too worked up. Or if he needs to get picked up and put back in his place. Or, y’know, whatever else.”

Keith nods for her, but confirms that they’ll probably be fine. The stairway creaks as she makes her way up to her room. When Keith hears the faint echo of her door slamming, he folds his arms over his middle and looks to Lotor.

Unfortunately for Keith’s resolve, the Crown Prince of Asshole Land has made his way back to the table with his coffee-stein and he yawns, scrubbing at one of his cheeks. The pot drips impatiently behind Keith, egging him on like he’s gonna regret it if he doesn’t spit out what he means to say and do it quickly. As he slumps against the counter, he groans at nothing in particular and Lotor blanches, ducking his chin and curling in on himself.

He recovers quickly, blinking when no one hits him or starts screaming. Which some of their friends and Ulaz would call projecting, on Keith’s part—but fact is, he recognizes that kind of flinching. He still does it himself more often than he cares to admit, and his heart writhes guiltily over how much he wanted to punch Lotor earlier.

Clenching his hand around his elbow, Keith considers apologizing for the interruption and then making himself scarce. Watching Lotor in the moments when Lotor drops most of his usual bullshit never really gets any easier, but it’s ten times worse when he’s too tired to let Keith forget how much they secretly have in common. Even without knowing _exactly_ what kind of shit Zarkon and Honerva ever pulled before they cut Lotor out of their lives as if he meant nothing to them, Keith knows that people don’t startle quite like that without a reason.

“So, who talks first,” Lotor deadpans, twirling his finger in his cowlick and almost doing a good impersonation of someone who _didn’t_ just provide Keith a glimpse of his metaphorical soft underbelly. “I assume that you have certain grievances you wish to air, but my side—”

“_Grievances_. Right. Yeah, totally, you could say that. Just a bit.” Keith shuts his eyes once that bursts out of him, forces himself to take a few deep breaths because they won’t have any good discussion if he’s flying off the handle every fifteen seconds.

Which works great, until his brain pulls up Shiro’s old mantra, inherited from Ojiisan: _“Patience yields focus.”_

Which, in turn, makes something hot and hungry flare up inside Keith’s chest, instead of steadying him like usual. He itches to go start a fight with someone. Not Lotor, but while Keith himself would feel bad for hitting the asshole, the _something_ that he’s wrestling with would more regret that Lotor can’t put up his best fight right now.

Gripping tighter onto his elbow, Keith guides himself through a few more deep breaths. Draws them in slowly and holds each one for a count of ten before letting them out. When he looks back to Lotor, he doesn’t really feel _calmer_? But it’s clearer to Keith that this probably isn’t the best time to let his restlessness and anger lead to any violence.

“Feel better?” Lotor prods, nearly sounding as if he cares how Keith feels about anything. “I hope that you do. That way, at least one of us will. Unfortunately, I spent the majority of our flight from LAX being used as a human football by an up-and-coming Cristiano Ronaldo knockoff—”

Keith snorts despite himself, because that mental image is actually pretty funny.

At least Lotor doesn’t seem offended when he supposes that he sees the humor. “Regardless? In the moments when I _did_ manage to rest my eyes, it was hardly comfortable.” Slouching over onto one of his elbows, Lotor nestles his cheek in his palm. “As I’m sure you can imagine? Now that Shiro has made good on his threats to lose weight, Shiro’s shoulders and biceps do not make such lovely pillows as they once did. They remain infinitely preferable to my own, I’m sure, but…” A limp shrug. “There is simply something missing—”

“At least a hundred pounds of something,” Keith grumbles.

“_Two_ hundred pounds of something, darling. Plus twenty more on top of that, if you wish to acknowledge the full extent of the damage.” The way that Lotor’s lips quick almost looks apologetic. “He will likely tell you so, himself. But in the hopes of minimizing any shock for you: he has gone from four-hundred-and-thirty-five pounds to _two_-hundred-and-fifteen. As you can no doubt imagine, our mutual _friend_ is incredibly pleased with this, overall.”

So many thoughts swarm into Keith’s mind, refuse to let him respond as quickly as he’d like. He digs the small of his back into the counter’s edge, scratching an itch and (hopefully) keeping himself from flipping any tables. He can’t tell _what_ Lotor wanted to imply with the emphasis he put on the word _friend_, but too many of the possibilities are making Keith want to grind his teeth or scream bloody murder. “I just… What in the Hell _happened_?”

“Lance asked the same question,” Lotor offers noncommittally. “After completely failing to recognize Shiro and shoving him aside to get at me.”

“I don’t blame him! He’s never seen Shiro any lighter than three-hundred pounds before—”

“Would that no one had to endure such horrible fates. Unfortunately, as Shiro reminded me enough times that I stopped counting?” Lotor grimaces as he says, “We are discussing _his_ body. Therefore, _his_ choices and desires take precedence over ours or anyone else’s.”

“…Point taken,” Keith bites out. Because he can’t argue that, especially not when Lotor’s being so _reasonable_. Unfortunately, Keith also can’t think of what else he wants to say to that. Worse, nothing that comes to mind seems _helpful_.

“If I may, my dear?” Lotor smirks, but there’s no real intent or energy behind it. None that Keith can discern. “It feels as though our positions on the matter of Shiro’s body have rather reversed. I clearly recall our conversations when he and I were still together. All the infinite variations in which you threatened to personally destroy me if I ever neglected his wishes and tried to force him to gain weight in service of my own kinks. Ever so many lectures about the myriad nuances of consent, as though I had no idea how to respect his choices—”

“I’m not _against_ him losing weight, if that’s what makes him happy!” Keith slouches, dragging his back along the counter. It probably counts as another thing he shouldn’t do, but it’s better than banging his head against the nearest wall. “I’m not _angry_—”

“Obviously not.” Lotor considers that interruption for a moment before he clarifies, “I mean that sincerely. If you were truly as angry as you seem, then you would be going colder than this. And you would be making a point out of how much I love helping pretty boys get fat…” A pointed sip of coffee. “You would bring it up as though the two of us don’t know how Shiro has tried to shame himself out of being similarly excited by other people’s weight gain.”

“I hate it when you’re fucking right.” Feeling like he might explode, Keith lets his hair flop in front of his face. “Look, I just want to understand what’s going on with him, okay? You two come back after a year-and-a-half, he’s got the body that he’s wanted since he was, like, thirteen. Since he first went over two-hundred pounds. I respect that, I do, but…” He chokes back a Lance-worthy whine. “His history says him keeping secrets about this is unhealthy, right? That’s not just me being paranoid?”

Lotor sighs. “For what little it’s worth? I told him that he should have let you know beforehand, if he didn’t want to tell anyone else among our Gang. The lack of selfies on social media started as his usual…” With a huffy noise, Lotor vaguely waves his hand in front of his face by way of saying that he’s not sure what to say. “There’s a Galran word that I’m thinking of? But there isn’t really—or at least, I can’t remember any decent, single-word English translation for it?”

“Go for it anyway.” Maybe Keith didn’t spend most of his twenty-five years knowing that he’s half-Galra. But he is, and his adoptive fathers are both fully Galra. Keith’s still learning his way around anything adjacent to Galran language and culture, and there are more important things today—but still, he’d like the chance to learn.

“It’s, _‘mektara’_?” Lotor looks to Keith, and shrugs when Keith doesn’t recognize the word. “It refers to a specific kind of modesty and desire for privacy. One that has a basis in self-denial or self-effacement. Usually with subtext that it may not reflect someone’s true self or honest desires, though you can discern certain insecurities. Often, it carries implications that someone is deliberately hiding themself away, more than being modest for its own sake. Almost invariably, it’s rather like, ‘She doesn’t think that she’s good enough’ or, ‘He’s fishing for compliments.’ For example, _‘mektara’_ is what the Ladies and I say around here when…”

He rolls his eyes and his cheeks twinge pink, but Lotor nevertheless explains, “They use the term I start talking down about mine and Shiro’s creative work, or downplaying my own role in making it happen, because I want someone to tell me how good they think I am. Shiro, naturally, exhibits more of the, ‘hiding oneself away out of some nonsense belief that one doesn’t deserve to be seen’ type of _mektara_, but my point still stands.”

“What _is_ your point, exactly?” Keith frowns and hopes that he doesn’t sound too ungrateful. “I mean, thank you for the vocabulary lesson? But I lost track of where you thought you were going with that?”

Lotor blinks at him for a moment, with the pensive expression of a cow who badly wants to understand the oncoming train rather than getting out of the way, then downs a deep swig of his coffee. He says, “I merely meant to explain that Shiro’s lack of social media selfies did not start as an intentional attempt at hiding information about his state of being from anybody, least of all you. And my own lack of pictures of him started as attempted respect for how much he dislikes being photographed? But then, we were simply too busy with the fellowship, the internship, that whole… Dream-chasing business of ours.”

That sounds reasonable enough, and Keith guesses he can see where Lotor’s coming from. “But still, keeping that up for a year-and-a-half?”

“I said that his lack of selfie-posting _began_ accidentally, not that it _stayed_ that way.” Possibly to Lotor’s credit, he grimaces as if he understands that this was not one of Shiro’s better ideas or patterns of behavior. “He kept taking selfies, as Ulaz suggested. But aside from me, he only shared them with a coworker who did not deserve his interest, but that’s beside the…”

Trailing off, Lotor purses his lips. He glares at Keith—no doubt at the flush creeping onto his cheeks—but at the moment, Lotor’s as threatening as a newborn bunny.

“Please understand that this judgment has nothing to do with whether or not _you_ deserve our mutual _friend’s_ romantic affections,” he drawls, putting an even sharper emphasis on that last word. “I say that Alexander did not deserve to be with dear Takashi because he was a skinny, cookie-cutter wannabe who didn’t develop Hanahaki over our _friend_ until he’d already slimmed down considerably. In general, I wouldn’t hold the lack of a Hanahaki flare-up against Alexander _or_ the fact that it took him so long to get there—”

“There’d better be a, _‘But’_ coming in here somewhere—”

“_But_…” Lotor arches an eyebrow as if daring Keith to interrupt again. “What I truly hold against him is the fact that, when Shiro did lower his standards and go get dinner with him? Alexander outright said… Well, several things that Shiro has told himself about whether or not he would have deserved love, had he once again failed to lose any weight—”

“At least he’s _open_ about being a fat-shaming bag of dicks—”

“He cloaked it all in the veneer of appreciation, Keith.” Lotor’s blue eyes flash like the edges of those fancy knives he loves collecting. “Alexander wrapped his fat-shaming in a party dress of pretty lies and euphemisms, then acted as though Shiro ought to have been grateful for his change of heart. Proud of himself _not_ for setting his mind to something he wanted and working his ass off to get there, but because he changed the opinion of someone who was so shallow…”

A shake of the head and a hiss that reminds Keith of a viper. “I do not claim that this will be verbatim,” Lotor says, barely above a whisper. “But Alexander said something to the effect of, ‘I used to think you’d be gorgeous if you weren’t so fat. And you _have_ gotten gorgeous, but I never thought you’d actually lose the weight. Or if you did, I thought you’d just have liposuction.’”

Putting this clarification out there, Lotor scowls deeply. Between that and the chill in his voice, Keith can’t help gulping. As much as they’ve ever argued with each other, Keith has only rarely seen Lotor make a face like this. The only time it was ever aimed at him, Lotor and Shiro were still together. Keith had been needling Lotor for five days straight about whether or not he _really_ respected Shiro, or if being a chubby chaser meant that he’d lose interest and dump Shiro if he ever got on a diet that worked out how he wanted.

In retrospect, Keith deserved Lotor’s exasperation and cold outrage. There’s a tight feeling in his chest from simply thinking about that. Tight and hot and prickly, alternately biting and tickling, as if he has insects crawling around his lungs. It feels like he might have another Hanahaki flare-up brewing, but it almost definitely can’t be. Not impossible, granted, and Keith knows better than to underestimate his own ability to blossom for someone at a moment’s notice. But his flare-ups typically announce themselves with a scratching sensation in his throat, not this buggy feeling in his lungs.

Besides, he _knows_ that Shiro loves him so there’s nothing unrequited for him to cough and hack about. Even if Shiro might not want Keith in the same ways that Keith does him, Shiro is the only person in Keith’s life whose love, to Keith, is certain and undeniable.

Either way, the fact that this Alexander guy went and earned Lotor’s wrath as well—the fact that he even _dared_ to act like Shiro could only be beautiful with abs—makes Keith want to steal Allura’s car, drive out to LA, and kick the fucker’s teeth in. Somehow, he doesn’t think Lotor would try to stop him.

After another swig of coffee, Lotor all but confirms that he wouldn’t bother: “As if that were not enough already? Alexander told him that losing so much weight must have taken such hard work and dedication. That watching Shiro slim down completely changed his idea of Shiro being some sort of… Slothful fuckhead _vakmert_ who didn’t take care of himself and contentedly mooched off of me while I did all the work in our creative partnership… Never mind that Shiro visibly did more work not only for us and our projects? But also for our bosses, our coworkers—”

“Fact check for me?” Keith snaps. “Murder. Still illegal?”

“Yes. Very much so, to my absolute chagrin.” As not-exactly-but-kinda-nice as it is to hate the same person instead of going at each other, Lotor arches a perfectly manicured eyebrow as if he can tell that Keith might well be up to something. “Has this helped, then? Do you feel you have a better understanding of the situation? Or are you sitting on a question, for fear of… Lord only knows what?”

Keith shakes his head. With Lotor’s permission to speak plainly, he sighs and asks, “Why did you help him do it?”

In his head, that was going to be an epic calling-out. But even before Lotor lets his expression soften into something that could be confusion, sympathy, or pity, Keith feels more like a pathetic, mewling kitten than anything else. That doesn’t help whatever’s going on inside his chest. As he hugs himself tighter around the stomach and lets his shoulders hunch, Keith feels like his lungs are shrinking. Like someone’s hooked him up to a vacuum and they’re sucking the air and fluids out of him, trying to drain Keith of everything he has in him, refusing to let him simply _breathe_.

“Not that I cannot guess your meaning,” Lotor says, so gently that it’s Keith’s turn to flinch. “But it would help if we understood each other better, so may I request that you specify?”

“Why did you help him lose the weight, smart-ass?” Keith doesn’t yell, but it’s taking every bit of willpower he can summon not to let himself start screaming. “You _know_ how he gets about this shit. You _know_ what he does to himself when he gets like that. You’re the one who first tried to get him to do that body positivity and self-acceptance work with Ulaz. Besides? I know how you get off on fat guys, so how could you even, I don’t know? Spit in the face of everything you _claim_ that you believe, this week?”

Lotor opens his mouth, no doubt with some snappy retort at the ready. But before he even starts, he thinks better of it. Sighs and rolls his neck as he straightens up. He leans back in his seat, holding the coffee-stein in front of his chest with both hands and giving Keith the feeling that he’s back in middle school, once more getting called into Principal Shepherd’s office for fighting. Or maybe like he’s getting stopped by one of the popular kids, summoned to their table in the lunchroom, and interrogated about his haircut, his shoes, his missing Mom, his Dad’s laundry list of DUIs, his adoption when it happened, his difficulty playing well with others, or anything else that they wanted to use against him.

For an uncomfortably long moment, Lotor drags those obnoxious, broken glass-blue eyes up and down every inch of Keith’s body. He narrows them while peering at Keith’s middle, but there’s more confusion than suspicion behind the expression Lotor’s wearing. By the time he meets Keith’s eyes again, the only thing he looks is tired.

“I am not particularly proud of what I did while we were in California,” he admits, sounding like he has to drag the words out of himself by whatever they have instead of hair. “But I would have had further, even worse regrets, had I done nothing. I doubt that this offers you much comfort? But everything I did with him about this, I did for the same reasons that you are currently upset.”

“And what, exactly, _are_ those reasons?” Keith knows what _his_ are, sure. But he doesn’t trust that his ideas and Lotor’s are going to line up more than slightly.

Tilting his head, Lotor shoots Keith a bemused frown. “Because I love the beautiful idiot, whether romantically or not," he says as though this should have been perfectly obvious. “Because he remains one of the only decent boyfriends I have ever had, one of my best friends, my creative partner, and I want him to be happy? Even if his vision of happiness is different from what I would find most attractive? As long as he is not harming himself, I support him.”

Explanations like that would’ve been enough for Keith. Yet, over the rim of his stein, Lotor apparently cannot help asking, “What else could I possibly have meant by saying that?”

“Nothing? But maybe a lot of things? Not that I thought…” Keith groans. “We want to be on the same page with each other, right? To make this easier?”

Lotor nods, supposing that he more or less sees Keith’s point. “Anticipating a series of questions that you have not asked yet,” he says, tonguing at his lips. “He told me that he planned to slim down in California shortly before we left, and asked if I would help him. Gave me about a week to think that over. Then, we were in Los Angeles, away from you and the Gang, and I mistakenly thought that he would’ve given up that notion—”

“Except he hadn’t?” Keith struggles to keep his voice down, but as much as this situation makes his heart feel like it’s boiling, he’s rather getting the sense that it isn’t Lotor’s fault. Not as much as he initially expected.

“Quite the opposite. He had only gotten more galvanized, _especially_ in light of needing to buy himself two seats on our flight.” Pausing for another sip of coffee slows them down, but in light of the discussion, Lotor deserves that bit of comfort, at the very least. “Having seen how these misadventures tend to go with him—and selfishly, wanting him to stay big and beautiful because I personally preferred his body that way—I tried to talk him out of going through with this. I used every gambit, every argument, every rhetorical trick in my arsenal, excluding certain physically intimate ploys that he and I haven’t done together since our romantic breakup—”

Keith doesn’t mean to let a bitter, barking laugh claw its way out of him. He doesn’t mean to cut Lotor off when he’s being uncharacteristically forthcoming. But he does it anyway, and instead of getting cranky or offended, Lotor merely looks confused.

“Why would I use that particular breed of wiles when I know that he has given a standing claim on his affections to someone else?” When this gets him a scoff, Lotor rolls his eyes. “Do you think that I’m an idiot, Keith? Narti is _blind_ and even she can see that he wants to be with you—”

“So, why hasn’t he _done anything_ about it?” Keith swallows thickly. His lungs prickle again, feeling like they’re stuffed with Pop-Rocks. “Seriously, I thought that he did too, but? I told him I didn’t care about his weight, and if he wants to be with me so badly, then why hasn’t he…”

The high, skeptical arch of Lotor’s eyebrow makes Keith trail off. Milking the moment for everything he can, Lotor makes Keith wait in silence while he treats himself to a long drink of coffee. His eyebrow never wavers once.

“Why do _you_ think he hasn’t done anything, Keith? Before we left for USC, he had a notion in his head that being fat meant that he did not deserve to be with you. Worse, he had an idea that you were only pretending not to want him thinner because you wanted to shield his sensitive heart from any damage. Yes, I _realize_…” He holds up a hand, signalling for Keith to muffle his objections. “This was all exceptionally stupid of him. I tried to tell him that _several_ times—”

“Did he do this, this…” Keith stomps at the linoleum, as if it might shake loose the cerebral wires that make his vocabulary remember how to work. “Did he go on a ridiculous crash diet like this is some god-awful, fat-shaming makeover rom-com movie? Like he had to have some big, ‘not to hot’ moment _just _to be my boyfriend?”

“Not exclusively, no. Had I believed that was his only reason for wanting to lose weight, I would not have helped him do it. I would have agreed to his face and then promptly ratted him out to you.” As often as Lotor deserves to have his honesty questioned, he says this openly, flatly, while looking Keith directly in the eye. “In that situation, I would have scrounged up the spare cash to fly you out to California so that you could yell at him in person, if you’d wanted.”

“Thanks for that… I think.” He leans his head back as he adds, “But what d’you mean by, ‘Not _exclusively_’?”

“He swore that wanting to be with you was not one of his reasons for wanting this, and that all he cared about was doing this for his own sake, but…” Lotor shrugs. “Personally, I disagree with his assessment. Based on years of observing his behaviors—if not nearly as many as you—and more than a few unethical peeks at the contents of his journals.”

“Y’know, I should really _not_ support you doing that—”

“Your quiet support can be our private little secret.” With that said, it’s Lotor’s turn to take some slow, meditative breaths. After a moment, he turns his uncharacteristically sober expression back to Keith. “If any of this comforts you? First, despite my objections, he made it clear that he was going on another diet, whether I helped him out or not. I figured that, by cooperating with him, I could keep him from doing anything too dangerous—”

“Did that work?” God, Keith wishes that his voice didn’t sound so small right now.

Then again, he also wishes that his lungs would stop feeling like they’re catching fire. He _also_ wishes that straight-up telling Shiro how he feels were even remotely likely to make Shiro listen when he’s probably made up his mind and decided to be a stubborn ass about whether or not Keith would ever love him back. It’s a bit like the advice that Antok always offers when he’s too tired to be clever: _“Wish in one hand. Spit in the other. Tell me which one fills up first.”_

So, if Keith has to sound like a sick cat while asking, “Lotor, _please_. Did he do anything to hurt himself?”—then he’ll suck it up.

To his credit and Keith’s relief, Lotor does not point out how pathetic Keith must sound right now but only says, “Well, despite how shocking you find the change in his physique? He did not _actually_ crash diet, thanks to me. I also tried to keep him from engaging in any of those all-or-nothing fallacies that have tripped him up so many times before. Moderation, rather than completely foregoing certain foods or restricting his caloric intake to unhealthy extents—”

“You _know_ those aren’t the only ways he could’ve—”

“I did not say that they were. I merely wanted to address that _particular _concern of yours.” Flipping his cowlick off his face, Lotor sighs. “While he and I negotiated, I reminded him that I am not a doctor and have never played one, either. With that in mind, I refused to help him at all if he attempted anything without medical supervision. He agreed, found a physician who didn’t ignore his other vitals or test results in favor of a number on the scale. He _listened_ to her, even when he didn’t like what she had to say. He had his final appointment with her on Monday and said she seemed satisfied that he hasn’t completely wrecked his body. I also saw no signs of him lying to me, so…”

Lotor shrugs, but doesn’t seem particularly reassured by any of this. “I agree with you that this would have been better for everyone if he simply had not lost weight at all, but…” Another flip of the cowlick. Another quirk of the shoulders. “I did what I could to make sure that he did things without hurting himself. As it stands?” Another sip of coffee. “He believes that he is quite happy, that he is now perfectly secure in his own skin, and that every problem in his life will magically be fixed by getting abs—”

“But you don’t think so?”

Looking like a human rainstorm, Lotor shakes his head. “I would have an easier time believing that my Mother has admitted to her drinking problem and sought professional help.” After a long sigh, he adds, “I also do not believe that finally resolving over a decade of pent-up romantic and sexual tension with you will solve his problems. Which is not to say that you couldn’t _help _him, merely that getting together with him cannot fix everything. Which is one of the themes that _he_ wove into our most recent screenplay. Sadly, this doesn’t mean that Shiro has learned a damn thing from his own writing.”

Although he rather wants to ask what kinds of romantic advice radio shows Lotor’s been listening to lately, Keith nods in understanding. Pushes one hand back through his hair. Gets his bangs off his forehead where they’re marginally less annoying. “So what do we do about it? About _any_ of it?”

Lotor shrugs and looks up at the ceiling. For a moment, all he offers Keith is a wordless noise that sounds a lot like,_ “I don’t know.”_ But once he’s out of coffee and his stein is resting on the table, he decides to use his words again.

Unfortunately, what he decides to say is, “I would counter by asking what _you_ intend to do with your newfound fifty pounds? Forty-five?” Humming too pensively for what they’re talking about, Lotor squints at Keith’s stomach again, as if he thinks that he has X-ray vision. When Keith hugs himself defensively, Lotor snickers. “I stand by my guess of fifty. That said, your sweatshirt, your posture, and your general build are making it difficult for me to get an accurate estimate.”

“It’s Hunk’s sweatshirt,” Keith says, mouth taking over while his brain-waves turn to static. “And fifty, yeah. As of yesterday morning. And this morning. And why I am telling you this, but more importantly? How the fuck can you even _tell_? Shiro didn’t notice! Lance said I hid it fine—”

Lotor bursts out with honest, deep, full-bodied laughter, his whole face contorting as he doubles over. He moves to hug himself but instead, folds his arms up on the table and face-plants into them. This does nothing to muffle the sound, only gives him the chance to thump a fist on the table while he’s howling in long pent-up delight. His laugh still has a sound like razor blades and broken glass clattering out of a piñata, but he seems to be enjoying himself.

Despite how hot and red Keith’s flushing, Lotor cracking up like this is so rare an occurrence that, while he’s getting it out of his system, Keith checks out the window above the sink for flying pigs, raining frogs, or any signs that the sky might possibly be falling. He probably gives Lotor a half-decent profile view to stick into his mental folder of evidence about how chubby Keith is getting.

Or anyway, he _would_, if Lotor could shut up and pull himself off the table. Granted, he might not want to. Given how long he goes without giving up much more than a snicker, though, Lotor likely needs this. He _needs_ more humor in his life, more joy. Keith hates being the one to help him out and he hates being laughed at. But maybe there’s a silver lining or a greater good hidden _somewhere_ in his humiliation_._

After two-and-a-half minutes, he’s still going strong, increasingly gasping without showing any signs of slowing down. To keep himself from yelling about it or getting Zethrid when there isn’t actually a problem, Keith refills Lotor's stein with coffee. That makes Lotor slow down somewhat, but he doesn’t put in real effort until Keith brings him a glass of water.

It takes a longish moment and a few sips of water, but finally, Lotor composes himself. Slumping back onto his elbows, he says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh, but… That… Thank you for that, Keith. That was, without question, the best joke that I have heard in at least eight months.”

Keith’s cheeks heat up again as he whispers, “I’m being _serious_.”

“I _know_, that’s what makes it so funny, I just…” Grinning so broadly, it threatens to shred his face, Lotor titters like he might start up again. But a deep breath and a shake of the head stops him from doing so. “First of all, Lance has been here and gotten used to your new weight. Secondly, Shiro—bless his beautiful, stupid heart—thinks that he can make himself stop having kinks by ignoring them hard enough and asking Ryou to shame him for having them. Most importantly, however?”

He shrugs. Smirks like he’s feeling incredibly pleased with himself—and knowing Lotor, he likely is.

“I’m a _feeder_, Keith,” Lotor says as if it’s really just that simple. “A feeder and a self-admitted chubby chaser. Beyond that, I am especially hard-up at the moment because the best boyfriend I’ve ever had only asked me to use my expertise with him _after _we broke up, while he was trying to lose weight rather than gain it, thereby seriously limiting my ability to enjoy the experience—”

“Okay,” Keith groans. “Point taken.”

“Oh, but I’m not done yet, darling—”

“Because of course you aren’t. _Of course_—”

Straightening himself ever-so-slightly, Lotor gestures at Keith’s face. “Your cheeks have gotten fuller. Which, aside from being exactly what I’m into, is a good look for you. You no longer have the appearance of a feral, starving cat that somehow became a real boy—”

“_Must_ you?” Keith splays a hand over his mouth, trying to cover as much as he can.

“You asked,” is all Lotor has to say for himself. Next, he points at Keith’s stomach. “The oversized sweatshirt is an immediate tip-off to someone like me. True, it _could_ have meant that you wanted to hide having lost weight yourself, but…” He nods toward Keith’s thighs. “Those sweatpants do not lend themselves to a similar interpretation, _especially_ not in light of how they fit you—”

“What _about_ how they fit me?” Keith demands it before he can think to stop himself, then immediately cringes.

“Do you truly want to hear about that, darling?” Lotor’s eyes glimmer, simultaneously a promise and a threat, and he flashes Keith a grin that’s sharper than his pointy elbows. “Because I can certainly treat you to such an explication, if that is what you wish and you are certain that said wish is what you want—”

“Shut up with your _Into the Woods_ blah blah blah blah,” Keith snaps. “Tell me what you meant about my sweatpants.”

“Oh, nothing much, really,” Lotor says, obviously lying without a care for how unsubtle he’s being. “I mostly meant to highlight the fact that you tried to pick a pair of especially baggy sweatpants, and while you managed this successfully? One, you almost never wear sweats outside the gym. And two, those pants do not conceal the way your thighs are absolutely huddling together.”

He pauses. Inhales sharply. Then, decides to add. “Your thighs look utterly delicious, by the way. Even if you are denying me the privilege of seeing them in their full, fleshy glory.”

Keith tries to bite out a response, but as he digs his back against the counter, all he comes up with is the thought of Shiro’s hands—those huge, firm hands with their soft, warm palms—grabbing at his thighs. Sinking his fingers into the pudge that Keith put on them in Shiro’s absence. Gripping them tight enough to make Keith yelp with pain or moan with pleasure or make the gasping, needy little noises that he makes when he’s really getting—

Hissing curses at himself more than anything else, Keith pinches the bridge of his nose. Dammit, he doesn’t need this kind of bullshit from himself right now. He doesn’t need whatever hot, sticky feeling has started swirling around inside his belly. He doesn’t need the guttural, reptilian part of his brain growling at him to slouch a bit while hugging himself tighter, as if that won’t hand Lotor more evidence that he can use to pick apart Keith’s appearance. He doesn’t need the tight, tingly feeling in his chest that refuses to amount to anything. Or the sensation like something clawing at the back of his neck with the full intent to dig out his spine. Or the way that Lotor’s grinning like a cat who’s been left alone in a mansion full of unguarded fish-tanks and irreplaceable, fragile objects.

Most of all, Keith doesn’t need the thought that springs up as one of his palms manages to sink past the sweatshirt’s fabric and find his pudgy side: _“What if _**_Shiro_**_ were the one telling me things like this… Would he even do it… That would be so—”_

By way of shaking himself out of his own head, Keith clears his throat. A cough follows, once he’s started, and he buries it in his elbow. Then comes another one. Then, a third. God, they aren’t hitting him in the way that he associates with a Hanahaki flare-up—the fiery feeling in his chest feels about right, but the coughing isn’t deep enough or wet enough for that, not yet—and that fact only makes them so much more annoying. If one of his coworkers gave him whatever sickness is going around the college, or at their siblings’ daycare centers, or wherever? Keith is going to blow a gasket over how much he doesn’t need this in his life.

The coughing goes on long enough that Keith turns to brace himself against the sink. For a moment, this seems to stop things in their tracks. Maybe he really is getting sick with something. Maybe one of his coworkers at the bookshop needs to have some Emergen-C and a box of DayQuil capsules lobbed at their fucking head when he next sees them. Keith stares out the window, counting his breaths as each one comes in easily, as if there’s nothing wrong and Keith’s an idiot for thinking that there might be.

On his seventh breath, the coughing comes for him again. _Jesus fucking Christ_, it’s deep. _Definitely_ Hanahaki deep. His whole chest shakes as his coughs racket through him, each one going further into Keith than the one before it. He clenches his hands around the edge of the sink. His arms tremble like the can’t hold him up. His shoulders hunch like an agitated cat. As the edge of the counter digs into his palms, Keith feels something thick teasing at his throat. He gasps for a deep breath and comes up hacking in a way that he’s all too familiar with.

When it finally dies down—when Keith sees the heap of black rose petals he’s spit up all over Lotor and the Gal Pals’ sink—all Keith can do is sigh. Good grief. Fucking _this_ again.

“Oh, dear,” Lotor says, his tone about seven shades too lightly for Keith’s liking. “That did sound nasty. Is The Gang’s resident human garden in bloom once more?”

Keith croaks, “What the fuck do _you_ think, genius.”

Just as he feels like he’s done, the coughing returns with a vengeance. This time, he produces a complete blossom, about halfway opened, rather than another round of petals. Another black rose, the same flower that Shiro’s been making people cough up since before Keith met him.

“So, who is the lucky sower, this time?”

Lotor hums in a way that suggests he already knows the answer, and whatever it stakes, Keith doesn’t want to let his single most annoying friend beat him, not today. Lotor can make as many vaguely pensive noises as he wants. He can peer at Keith as much as he wants, too. No doubt, he’s got some obnoxious expression twisting up his smug-ass, pointy face. With God as his witness, though, Keith does not want to give Lotor the satisfaction of beating him on this count.

Even if Keith has no specific idea what this count is supposed to be. Lotor _isn’t_ allowed to beat him on it.

Unfortunately, Keith’s silence makes Lotor start throwing out guesses: “Hmm, your reticence could mean that it’s _Lance_ again, but something tells me it likely isn’t. If it were Hunk or Allura, you would admit it easily, seeing as you’ve dated both of them. Zethrid’s blue violets would make you call her so the two of you could have a laugh about it. You would be infinitely more disgusted over Matt or Ryou. You would rub my face in it for Pidge, since you _know_ how sore I am that she makes people hack up green carnations. Is it I? Because if so, darling, I suggest that we adjourn to my bedroom—”

“For _fuck’s _sakes! Who the Hell do you _think_ I’m blossoming for?” Rolling his eyes, Keith picks up the bloom and faces Lotor. “Seriously? I’m surprised I lasted _this_ long. With you two coming back today and the twenty other times I’ve hacked up his goth trash black roses…”

“Oh, good,” says Lotor. “I suppose this means that I no longer need to lecture you about… Oh, I don’t know? The fact that your disappointment vis a vis Shiro’s body does not mean that you don’t love him? Or how you are _allowed_ to feel disgruntled that he came home from California with cast-iron pecs, thighs that could choke a bear, a butt you could eat breakfast off of, and that absolutely _hateful_ eight-pack he’s so horridly obsessed with?”

Keith doesn’t even have the energy to glare at him right now. “Yeah, you can keep that to yourself. I don’t need to hear that today, especially not from you.” And he _should_ leave well enough alone, but Keith can’t resist tacking on, “That goes double if you’ve been binge-watching _The Golden Girls_.”

Although he very likely has been, Lotor sips his coffee without confirming or denying anything. “For what little it’s worth? At present, you _do_ conceal your extra weight well enough that most normal people wouldn’t notice.” He lets the _“But”_ linger in the air between them while he sips his coffee. “I am also certain that you’re hiding the start of quite a nice little belly. Should it get much bigger, you won’t be able to keep it under wraps—”

“When it does, I won’t be trying to hide it.” Keith sets the bloom on the counter, starts scooping the petals out of the sink and into the trash-can. “I usually don’t cover up this much to begin with. I only bothered today ‘cause I thought I’d surprise Shiro—”

Lotor hums. “Only, come to find out, he lost more than your entire previous weight in California? Thereby derailing your ingenious plan to make him realize that he still finds you devastatingly attractive with love-handles and subsequently be kinder to himself?”

Flushing pink, Keith mutters, “Aren’t you a regular Sherlock Holmes.”

“Absolutely not. I am a queer, kinky Sherlock Holmes, which I should like to think is a vast improvement over any _regular_ one.”

“At least he wasn’t… I mean, my idea for today wasn’t even secondary or tertiary to the other reasons…” Keith’s cheeks get even hotter, but he’s already started digging this hole. No sense in abandoning it now and giving control to Lotor. Rather than let this become an interrogation, Keith admits, “It started because I slipped in the shower and cracked three ribs, okay?”

That gets an unbecoming snort out of Lotor, but at least he tries to compose himself. “After every other dangerous stunt you’ve ever pulled? Every injury that you shrugged off when lesser men would have been reduced to sobbing husks?” Another round of snickering. “And the one thing that _finally_ lays you up enough to put on weight… is _slipping in the shower_?”

“Hunk, Lance, Ezor, Narti, Pidge, and Matt have already had their laughs about that—”

“Well, can you _blame_ them?”

Keith can’t, but that doesn’t mean he wants to admit it. “_Anyway_,” he sighs. “Some of my regular clients online? They took an interest in the first ten, fifteen pounds. So, I leaned into some of the gaining, feeder shit for the extra cash. I had fun, so I kept doing it. And yeah, I thought I might surprise Shiro, like I said. Except then he got skinny and derailed it, like you said.”

“You can still make the point to him if you get creative, darling. Or simply attempt to make him admit that he’s in love with you.”

Just when Keith thought he might get his blushing back under control, Lotor makes it come back fiercer and hotter than anything else has done so far today. He _probably_ can’t hide it but Keith hunches his shoulders and ducks his chin regardless. Lets his hair flop in front of his face as a makeshift shield, meager though it is.

Considering that Keith gets most of his cash from selling videos of himself and flaunting his body to strangers on the Internet, he has no reason to get this sticky feeling in the back of his throat over the idea that Shiro is in love with him. Given how few limits Keith has, even when he isn’t rushing to get his share of the rent, he shouldn’t be blushing like he’s fourteen again over something that he’s wondered about for ages now, without any _helpful_ input from the Crown Prince of Asshole Land.

Keith can’t even get annoyed about the Hanahaki, really. With sixty-nine flare-ups of it under his belt before this one—averaging a little over four per year, since he was eight—Keith blossoms more easily than anyone he’s ever met. He’s had it romantically, platonically, and even familially. The first time, Keith hacked up his Mom’s raven-black dahlia petals for two weeks after she left him and Dad.

During his second outbreak, he could tell that Dad kept choosing his favorite whiskey over his only son. For the three weeks leading up to his death when Keith was eleven, Keith couldn’t stop coughing up columbines.

His third and fourth flare-ups brought up Kolivan’s nightshade flowers and Antok’s scarlet geraniums. According to the therapist that his case worker recommended, Keith didn’t believe that getting placed in such a good home could ever last for him, that Antok and Kolivan would ever want to keep him.

Problem is, thinking about Shiro in any capacity. Which, strictly speaking, has even less right to give Keith trouble than the Hanahaki. Still, as he shuts his eyes and grinds his back along the counter, Keith can’t manage to clear his head. One moment, it’s the thought of Shiro’s hands all over his body, fondling his belly and his love-handles, groping his chubby ass while he whispers about how warm and soft and good Keith feels. Keith’s breath hitches as a familiar feeling wells up in the back of his throat, something thick and viscous, something that wants to nestle against Shiro’s chest and kiss him to within an inch of his fucking life—nothing more and nothing less.

Another moment, Keith’s mind drifts to the idea of Shiro pinching at his flab and reprimanding him for getting fat instead, his voice and soft, grey eyes going cold in a way that Shiro only does with Keith when he’s wound himself up too tightly about Keith’s wellbeing and Keith’s being particularly stubborn.

Of course, Shiro would never do it. No matter what he’s “secretly” into, he cares about Keith so much that it’s sometimes terrifying. He’d probably worry too much about whether he was emotionally wounding Keith or not.

God, though, he could do such great things with those hands and that voice. He could grab up a roll of fat along Keith’s waistline, knead it hard enough that there’s a threat of leaving bruises, give it a firm shake and set Keith’s entire belly jiggling. He could break out one of the tones he uses when he’s angry with himself, and instead use it to tell Keith how badly he’s blimped up, how he used to be so trim and taut, how he’ll never get back abs and thigh-gap now that he’s such a greedy, swollen pig.

Then, that thought withers as Keith remembers those abs that Shiro had to flash for him and how firm they were beneath his hands. No doubt, they’d feel even better, pressed up against Keith’s tummy. Shiro’s hips would feel so good against Keith’s body too, now that Shiro’s finally lost his love-handles. If Keith straddled that beautiful idiot and pinned him to the bed, then he could clench his thighs around Shiro’s sides, drag his pudge all up and down that hard torso and those hip-bones. _Fuck_, rubbing on Shiro like a cat in heat would’ve been Heaven when he had his huge, fat belly to get lost in, all that flesh for Keith to play with…

But he would feel _so good_, splayed out on Keith’s bed, blushing while Keith manhandles him, struggling to breathe as Keith grinds and bounces against his chest, his abs firm and sturdy and unperturbed beneath Keith’s chub… God, Keith might not know how quickly he can put more weight on, but he’ll probably weigh more than Shiro in due time. Whether Shiro helps him get heavier or not, Keith could pin Shiro down with that heft and make him feel every single pound that Keith adds to his body. Thighs jiggling against Shiro’s torso, belly wobbling and trembling up on his abs, Keith holding his wrists (or maybe tying them to a headboard) so that Shiro can only feel what chubby parts Keith allows him to feel—

Hissing sharply, Keith shakes his head. Tries to banish those ideas, to think about _anything else_ but Shiro. He can come back to his fantasies later—maybe he’ll get a clip or two from some of them—but Keith _is not_ popping a goddamn boner in the middle of Lotor’s kitchen. Or giving himself another round of Hanahaki hacking, for that matter.

Going weirdly silent, Lotor waits for Keith to calm down and look at him again before saying, “You know, darling, should your beloved disappoint and leave you in need of some release?” His eyes twinkle as if he knows exactly what he’s doing. “I cannot promise to be yours exclusively, much less to show you anywhere near Shiro’s level of devotion when my heart belongs to another. But I have been told that my emotional damage helps make me a fantastic lover—”

“_Excuse_ me?”

“Additionally,” he purrs, “when Shiro and I were still together, my top choices for a hypothetical threesome were Hunk, Chris Pratt before he lost weight, and you if you ever gained at least fifty pounds. So…” Lotor shrugs as if he can slip into propositioning Keith so easily, without feeling any mental whiplash after everything else they’ve talked about today. “Should you ever feel the desire, do feel free to give me a call.”

Keith huffs, not disgusted but about fresh out of patience. “Why are you telling me this?”

“To gauge your reaction.” Lotor shrugs. “It happens to be the truth. However, I would have pretended otherwise and feigned an apology had you taken offense or felt genuinely hurt. Even considering our disagreements with each other, I do not truly wish you harm.”

“Thanks, I think. Again.” Even so, Keith has to ask, “Don’t you ever consider putting your efforts into something more useful than getting on people’s nerves? Like, I don’t know, asking Hunk out already? Instead of pining over him like an obnoxious drama princess?” Which he’d leave to stand on its own merits, but Lotor wrinkles his nose in confusion. Shrugging, Keith explains, “You aren’t showing the dignity required of a drama_ queen_ right now.”

Pursing his lips, Lotor turns that idea over for a moment. “I think I would prefer to be a drama princess, anyway. That way, I might get to star in a Disney movie and be whisked away on whatever Hunk has instead of a white stallion.” After a long sip of coffee, he adds, “Also, I would ideally be classier while asking Hunk out. Assuming that I got the words out in the first place, I’d be asking for an actual date, not simply a spirited romp around someone’s sheets. Then, there is the matter of managing this without hacking up yellow irises all over his beautiful face.”

“Oh, joy,” Keith deadpans. “At least I’m not the only garden-lung disaster around here.”

“Distinctly not. Does it make you feel better?”

“Kinda, yeah. A little bit.” Keith pushes his bangs off his forehead again. “If I’m gonna be stuck coughing Shiro’s goth trash black roses all over everything, it’s better not to be alone. I’d rather have Hunk or Zethrid or Allura, sure, but hey. You’re better than having absolutely no one.”

“In that case, I’m glad to be of service.” Tipping his coffee-stein in Keith’s direction and clearly readying himself to say something, Lotor inhales deeply. “To you and Shiro. May you unleash the cunning that I know you’re capable of, may he stop obstructing his own happiness, and may you both find euphoria with each other and have all the orgasms that you’ve ever dreamt of—”

“I dunno,” says Keith, smirking. “That’s a lot of orgasms.”

“I am aware. And I hope that you enjoy every single one of them.” As he leans back in his seat, Lotor manages what looks like one of his rare, genuine smiles. “Cheers to your romantic and sexual fulfillment, darling.”


	4. Chapter 4

That Keith wants to shoot a video before dinner with The Gang isn’t terribly surprising. It means Shiro can’t get in the full jog that he wanted to get after rousing from his nap, but as Keith notes, time constraints aren’t working alone. The weather sorta limits how long Shiro can stay outside, as well. Fortunately, the sidewalks aren’t terribly icy. Unfortunately, it’s quite a bit colder than Shiro remembers his winter jogs feeling, which quickly gets uncomfortable. Either way, Shiro has a beloved best friend who requires his expertise behind the camera.

Probably not what Mom and Dad were hoping for when Shiro first told him that he wanted to make movies when he grew up. _Definitely _not what Ojiisan wanted to come out of paying for Shiro’s education and his early experiments in filmmaking. But Keith’s amateur porn and fetish clips have helped pay the bills since he first got it in his head to try them out.

When Shiro gets back from his run, Keith’s busy setting up his room, getting the cameras in place and his supplies laid out. He wants to primp a bit before they shoot, but doesn’t mind letting Shiro have the shower first. At least Shiro doesn’t need too much time to clean himself up. More than the sweat, he’s washing off the lingering stench of the airport and the flight. It’s likely not as bad as Shiro’s making it out to be. But God, even now that he’s thinned out and toned up, flying makes him feel like he’s been drenched in Gatorade and come, then left outside in the middle of a particularly muggy August.

His heart stutters happily when he finds that Keith left him fresh bottles of his own shampoo and his favorite pomegranate body wash. Of course, Hunk would do something similarly kind for any of his friends—but Keith remembers what Shiro likes.

In Keith’s bedroom, Shiro finds that his beloved remembers more than just what Shiro likes for himself. He has everything set up so that they can make a video for his subscribers, exactly as Shiro taught him to do before they left: three of Shiro’s older cameras set up on tripods around his artfully rumpled bed, pointing toward the headboard from different angles. Keith’s lamps are arranged so that he won’t drown himself out too badly. One of the clip-on mics that hooks up to Shiro’s audio recorder sits atop the keyboard on Keith’s laptop, which in turn sits over in a back corner of Keith’s desk, against the wall and right below his autographed poster of Dolly Parton.

(Shiro has some new mics to try, but they’re packed up in one of his suitcases. For now, it’s easier to use one of their old standbys.)

It’s probably immature—and it’s _definitely_ not the point of anything today—but Shiro can’t help smirking at Keith’s screensaver. On a black screen, bright red letters scroll by slowly, spelling out, _BACK OFF MY FUCKING COMPUTER, LANCE. YOU’VE GOT YOUR OWN. _Keith’s had that since he and Lance first roomed together as freshmen. He’s kept it even through getting a new computer, even though Lance lives with Allura and Ryou in an apartment upstairs, not down here with Keith, Hunk, and Shiro. The message is so ridiculous, but it’s so very Keith. So familiar and it flushes Shiro’s chest with a warm feeling, inescapably one of being _home_.

Unfortunately, Keith’s bedroom reveals that he remembers what Shiro likes in more troublesome ways, as well. His laptop sits so far back on the desk because he’s filled most of the surface with food. Not just a bit of food either, but a veritable buffet—or at least something that wants to be a buffet when it grows up. More food than Keith can _possibly_ eat in one sitting, more than anybody should _try_ to eat in one sitting, and more than enough to make Shiro’s lungs writhe against his rib-cage. The pizza alone is big enough that Shiro, Hunk, and Keith could split it for dinner and still have leftovers.

Closest to the laptop sits a huge plate of cupcakes. Thirteen of them, some of Hunk’s creations. Shiro swallows thickly, looking down at the chocolate fudge spread across the chocolate cakes, at the red M&M’s that make smiley faces in the frosting. Cautiously—as if the sweets might turn into a snake and bite him—Shiro tilts one onto its end. Frowning, he forces himself to hold back a groan.

There’s a red spot on the bottom of the wrapper because of course there is. Because life does not want Shiro to catch any kind of break today. Because of course Keith had Hunk whip up some of his double-chocolate cupcakes with strawberry filling.

Of course Hunk did that for him, too. When Keith brought him the idea, he probably didn’t even question it. Because Shiro’s been away from home for eighteen months and those two _know_ which of Hunk’s cupcakes have always been Shiro’s favorites. That’s why Hunk put them in the care packages that he sent for Christmas and for Shiro’s birthday. Since Shiro didn’t tell them anything about his, Keith and Hunk couldn’t have known that he can’t eat like this anymore. So, _of course_ they put together this tray of cupcakes that they expected Shiro to love, the same way that he always has, as part of welcoming him back where he belongs.

Hugging himself with one arm, Shiro covers his mouth with the other hand. His tongue pushes against the back of his teeth as he chokes down on a cacophony of objections building up inside him. So many explanations come to mind for these cupcakes—after all, they might not be for Shiro; Hunk’s cupcakes are delicious and Keith might’ve ordered them because he wanted them himself—but the likeliest option? Is that Keith had Hunk make these for Shiro.

God, Keith’s probably going to kill him for turning them down. Hunk will feel hurt, and Keith will get angry, and—Oh Hell, Shiro can’t think like that. He _cannot_ let himself think about any of that. Not right now. Not when he and Keith have a clip to shoot before The Gang meets up for dinner and Shiro needs to keep his clarity, his focus.

That said, he also needs to know exactly what he’s dealing with right now. So, he keeps poking through the feast that Keith’s inexplicably laid out. Three huge Styrofoam containers sit stacked on top of each other, next to a paper plate of brownies. Most likely, those are some of Hunk’s as well, and Shiro chooses to ignore them for the moment, to peek inside the tower of take-out. Whatever it is, its strong, heady smell packs a wallop, slithering straight down to the pit of Shiro’s stomach. He purses his lips and balls one hand up in his t-shirt. Clamps the other one tight around his jaw as if, somehow, that will make his gut stop churning with _desire_.

“We’ve had lunch already,” Shiro whispers against his palm, hoping for this verbal affirmation to ground him better.

True, he threw said meal together out of the lean turkey, low-fat Swiss cheese, and raw vegetables that he found in the fridge. True, it wasn’t _enjoyable_ so much as functional, and Shiro wouldn’t let himself make a sandwich out of anything because Hunk and Keith only have that awful, over-processed WonderBread in their kitchen right now. True, whatever’s in the takeout containers smells _delicious_—but Shiro didn’t work his ass off to get these abs just so he could get home, indulge the way he used to do, and bury them in flab all over again.

Taking a deep breath, Shiro steels himself and opens the top container. Whatever this is, he can resist the temptation to chow down on it. In case anything about the lighting or the scene needs fixing, Shiro needs to know what he’s dealing with.

Apparently, the answer is drunken noodles with beef, green peppers, and American broccoli—one of Keith’s favorites, drowning in a sauce that Shiro can smell but can hardly see on the food. Throughout, the dish is liberally flecked with red bits of chili pepper because nothing is ever spicy enough for Keith. Maybe Shiro hasn’t seen the fare from their friendly neighborhood family-owned Thai place in long enough that no one there would recognize him anymore, but there’s no question of what this is. He can’t blame Keith for wanting to get it, either. Keith knows what he likes, and he doesn’t need to be on a diet just because Shiro is.

_Not with a crazy metabolism like he has_, Shiro muses, then rolls his eyes at himself. God, thoughts like that aren’t fair. It’s not Keith’s fault that he has better genes than Shiro, or that he can eat whatever he wants without bulking up at all. Jealousy helps nobody, least of all Shiro.

With a sigh, he sets that first container on the pizza box and checks the second container’s contents. He finds more of the broad noodles and American broccoli from the first one, but drenched in a dark brown sauce that has a heavier smell than the drunken noodles. Rather than beef, this one has a mix of chicken, tofu, and eggs. From the looks of it, Keith ordered extra of his proteins; even though Shiro can make out the green of Keith’s vegetables, he can hardly see the broccoli amongst everything else in Keith’s food. Pad See-Iew, another of Keith’s favorites and that’s good to see, it really is.

It’s so good for Keith that he can enjoy food like this without concern for what might or might not come out of that. It’s good for him that he doesn’t need to worry about the side-effects, as Shiro does.

Shaking his head and rolling his eyes, Shiro moves on to the third container, easily the biggest of the lot. Inside, he finds what must be a double-sized helping of Pad Thai with chicken. He inhales sharply and clings to his shirt so hard, it’s a miracle that his nails don’t puncture the fabric. Shiro takes in the sight before him, the far-too-pretty picture of thin noodles in a lighter brown sauce, with cubes of chicken and tofu, lumps of egg, a thick dusting of crumbled peanuts, and bean sprouts woven in among the rest. He clenches his jaw as he snaps the lid back down again. As soon as he’s hidden the container under the other two, Shiro turns his back on the desk and hugs himself again.

He splays a hand out on his side, pressing against the firm muscle that he finds. Focusing on taking slow, deep breaths, Shiro ghosts down to his hip without letting up on holding himself. Even with the cotton blend wall between his palm and his fingers, he gets all the reminder that he needs: he isn’t a blubbery, jiggling fat-ass anymore. He’s lost his love-handles and toned himself up everywhere, gaining not only abs but a whole physique in which he can take pride. He looks better than he has in years. He _feels_ better than he can ever remember feeling, even in the before-time before he really started gaining weight. He set his mind to getting a body like this. He had a goal in mind and he made it happen.

Yeah, alright, Shiro isn’t as ripped as he’d like. On doctor’s orders and Lotor’s insistence, Shiro still hasn’t gotten to “Hugh Jackman as Wolverine” levels of beefcake, the way that he’s wanted since he was a kid, since the first time that he dragged Ryou and their grandfather to see the original _X-Men_ movie. But after so long hating everything about the skin he’s in, Shiro _likes_ his body, now. No matter how much he _wants_ to indulge—no matter how much his stomach twists with yearning over Keith’s little smorgasbord—Shiro needs to hang on to this thought. For the first time in forever, he _actually_ _likes_ _his body_.

Such reminders, unfortunately, are more than slightly necessary. Even if Shiro had foregone his usual meal plans and let himself pig out for lunch, he would’ve needed to rehash how much work he did to get his body how it is. Before California, Pad Thai was one of _Shiro’s_ favorite orders from Siam Spicy, not one of Keith’s. When he and Lotor left for USC, Shiro could have easily devoured the entire container and felt like he wanted more. It would’ve taken him a while to get through everything—but not as long as it should’ve done, and Shiro would barely have noticed the pain of cramming so much food down his own throat—but he _could_ have done it.

He _did_ do it, too. About a week before he and Lotor flew out to LAX. One final over-indulgence before getting serious about his weight problem. Shiro and Keith ordered more than they needed of their favorites from Siam Spicy, enough that they should have had more leftovers than the wound up with. Except Shiro was treating himself one last time, and Keith got caught up in the rush of it as well because he’s never in his life had to worry about his weight. Next thing they knew, most of their order had disappeared into their stomachs.

Digging his fingertips against his side, Shiro tries to ignore the thought of how beautiful Keith looked that night, smiling and laughing and leaning against Shiro’s side because they knew that they didn’t have much time left to spend together. He tries not to let himself think about how many of the appetizers he ate that night, how he kept telling himself to stop and kept not listening. He tries to tune out memories of how he promised himself that _“one last indulgence” _still wouldn’t end up too excessive. Shiro had fucked up too many diets before by letting himself go in too hard on so-called last indulgences and shooting his resolve in the foot before things got off the ground.

But he got so swept away in Keith’s beauty and in being close to him that he didn’t notice how much he was allowing himself to eat. Not a single thing got through to him. Not until his fork scraped along the bottom of the container.

Coming up with nothing on his fork that time, his cheeks flushed hot, the same way that they’re doing now, and the full effect of that binge slammed into him in waves. The cramped, tight sensation in his stomach came on quicker than Shiro would’ve expected, catching up to him after he’d successfully kept himself from noticing. Without more food to down, though, he had no distractions left and felt so impossibly huge that his fat should have pinned him to the sofa. So stuffed and bloated that one of his largest t-shirts was riding up around his belly. Pain shot through him any time he tried to move, even just a little bit.

Worst of all, though, was the nausea. Second-worst was Keith kneeling on the cushion next to him, dabbing sweat off of his forehead with a paper towel, asking if Shiro needed anything, massaging his stomach as much as he could manage when Shiro tried to flinch away from any contact. But the feeling like he might’ve been sick beat everything else about how horrible that night was for Shiro. If it had come simply from over-indulging, that would’ve been one thing. Not idea, still uncomfortable, but more or less alright.

Instead, Shiro felt like he might vomit and some part of him so badly wanted to because he was so thoroughly disgusted with himself, and he _knew_ that anybody else but Keith would have been as well. Even if Keith wasn’t showing it, he could’ve been grossed out too, and only hiding it because he cared too much about not hurting Shiro’s feelings. But Shiro would’ve deserved to hear anything and everything that Keith might’ve come up with about how sickening Shiro was. About what a horrific, disgusting pig he’d gone and let himself become. About how Ojiisan had tried to give him everything and would’ve been _so ashamed_, had he been able to see how much Shiro had let himself go—

“Shiro?”

Gasping, Shiro crashes out of his own thoughts. He pinches the bridge of his nose so he’ll have a feeling to latch on to, something to remind him of where the real world begins and ends. Once his mind feels mostly clear, he blinks over at the doorway. At Keith standing in the doorway. At Keith furrowing his brow as if _Shiro’s_ the one who’s being confusing right now.

Which, honestly? Isn’t really fair, when Keith’s carrying a tape measure and the scale from their bathroom. He’s drowning in a t-shirt that Shiro recognizes as one of his old favorites, but of everything about Keith’s current appearance, that shirt makes the most sense. It’s black, with the cover art of Baühaus’s _Bela Lugosi’s Dead_ printed on the chest. Aside from being huge on him, it hits Keith’s thighs low enough that he could belt the stupid top and wear it as a dress. He asked Shiro to leave it here because he likes borrowing Shiro’s clothes, and Shiro relented because he’s always been weak for the promise of Keith’s happiness.

Tucking his white forelock behind his ear, Shiro opens his mouth to speak—but Keith beats him to the jump with, “Are you feeling okay? I can call Allura to come help if you need to lie back down—”

“I’m fine, Keith. Promise.” Taking a deep breath, Shiro isn’t sure how much he believes that. But he digs his backside against the edge of the desk and clarifies, “I wouldn’t say that I’m at my full, hundred percent or anything? But it’s all nerves about dinner tonight. Nothing major.”

Allowing himself to slouch at the hips, Keith huffs. “Okay, but _your_ ‘nothing major’ would have most people screaming for their Xanax,” he points out, quirking one eyebrow pointedly but without making that point quite clear. The way he’s screwing up his lips _could_ be exasperated—understandably, with how many times they’ve had this conversation or a variant of it—but Keith’s expression could be fond, as well. It’s beautiful, but then again, everything about Keith is always beautiful. “Speaking of which, are you—”

“Dr. Hall never took me off of that one.” Shiro shrugs. “Yeah, sure, she was concerned, after Lotor and I first got sent her way? She usually doesn’t prescribe that one and having me come to her, already using it… But the Xanax was working, so she decided it was okay…”

Keith considers that for a moment, then gives Shiro a nod. “Well, good. At least _something_ was working out for you.”

He could stand to explain what he means by that, because it _sounds_ important to Keith but Shiro has no idea what he’s saying. But before Shiro can figure out how to ask, Keith’s bending over at the side of his bed. Any objections and questions wither up on his tongue, watching Keith set up the scale. His ass—is Shiro’s mind playing tricks on him, or is there more meat on Keith’s bones?

With that old shirt in the way, Shiro can’t rightly _tell _if he’s seeing things or not. But surely, Keith had more fabric billowing around him before Shiro left for California. At the mere thought that Keith’s ass might have gotten thicker while they’ve been apart from each other, Shiro’s throat feels so dry that actual human speech might be well beyond his capability right now. After so long of working on his own body and so much effort put into it, Keith might’ve finally bulked up a bit. Might’ve put on enough weight to make his strength clearer and more obvious to people. And if his ass is filling out his jeans more than ever, when it was already sufficiently juicy before Shiro went away—

“The clip we’re doing today is really straightforward, okay,” Keith says, stretching out his back without turning to face Shiro. Typical preparation before making one of his vids. “It’s for a pretty big milestone, but you’re back from a long time away. And I’ve had a seriously long-ass week already. And, y’know, sometimes you just gotta put all of the complicated bullshit aside and stick to the Kiss Rule—”

“_Keep it simple, Stupid_,” Shiro recites, nodding along with Keith’s idea.

“Yeah, and keeping it as close to no frills as possible? Is just easier for both of us. Easier for me to shoot, easier for you to edit—”

“Not for nothing, Keith? But…” Shiro drums his fingers along his elbow, forces himself to keep his eyes on Keith’s bed instead of looking back at the mini-buffet behind him. “I mean, maybe it’s just me? But this much food doesn’t feel like it’s really sticking to the _no frills_ ethos as much as you might want?”

“It’ll be fine,” Keith tells him, almost snapping but holding himself back from going all the way. “For one thing? Mostly, I just wanted to have some options open. I’m not eating _everything_ right now. I was _always_ planning on having leftovers—”

_Wait, what_—Shiro wrinkles his nose.

_Are you serious_—He tries to find the words that he wants to interject with.

_Keith, there’s so much food here_—But Shiro’s brain hasn’t gone out to lunch and left him with nothing in its place.

_And you don’t make those kinds of videos_—Yet, despite all the objections bubbling inside his chest and all the feelings threatening to burst out of his chest, Shiro’s head feels thick and sticky, and he can’t figure out how to work his mouth, and he’s just so—

“Anyway,” Keith huffs. He grunts softly, twisting his neck to work out one of the knots that he gets so easily when he’s stressed out about something. “I’m the one who has to eat it all. Not you. So, y’know…”

Grumbling without using his words, Keith reaches for the shirt’s bottom hem. He fumbles before getting his hands curled up in it. “You’re fine, Shiro. Don’t worry about your freaking diet, or how many calories you’ve had today, or whether you’ve worked out enough, okay? The cupcakes are for _my_ thing, not some grand conspiracy to sabotage you, or whatever the fuck…”

_I didn’t say that_, Shiro almost points out.

Except Keith pulls the t-shirt up and tosses it aside, and Shiro’s mind goes blank.

He’s staring at the figure that Keith cuts before him. Staring while his mouth hangs ever-so-slightly open, besides. Because staring in the first place clearly wasn’t bad enough. Shiro swallows thickly as his eyes dart up and down, taking in the sight of Keith’s body. With him exposed like this, there’s no question and no doubt about it: Keith’s put on weight. Not so much that Shiro would really call him _fat_, not yet? But Keith’s definitely gotten chubby, and Shiro can’t believe that he didn’t notice it when Keith hugged him at the airport.

Looking at him now, though, Shiro swallows thickly. He draws in a slow, deep breath, pulling his stomach even tighter than it already is. The lamp beside Keith hits him so that Shiro can’t miss the softness of Keith’s back, the creases in his flesh where he used to be all skin and bone and muscle. His hips are fuller, rounder, and absolutely tantalizing, with a dip above them where his waistline pinches in. As Keith reaches for the ceiling, working another kink out of his spine, he wiggles a bit. From behind, Shiro can’t see _too _much obvious jiggling but the rolls of pudge along Keith’s back pooch out just enough for Shiro to notice.

Watching Keith go, Shiro feels his cheeks erupt with heat. Covering his mouth with one hand probably won’t do anything to hide that. Not if the blush seeps down his neck or creeps up to the tips of Shiro’s ears. God, he’s gotta be going strawberry red, which means that he shouldn’t keep watching Keith like some kind of creep. But this is like one of Shiro’s most deeply-buried, well-hidden dreams coming to life, and his eyes might as well be hot-glued to his best friend. His best friend, who he’s in love with and who deserves everything he wants and the absolute best that life could ever have to offer him.

Sure, that was true before Shiro went to California—but it’s even truer, now. It shouldn’t have been possible for Keith to get more beautiful, except he’s standing right in front of Shiro and he obviously _has_. Although Keith’s thighs have always been stronger and thicker than people expected from him, he’s also had a thigh-gap that so many people would’ve killed for. Now, though, his thighs huddle together and crowd in on each other.

Above them, Keith’s ass strains the seams in the seat of his boxer-briefs. Shiro only barely manages to choke down a whimper when Keith bends over again, apparently double-checking something on the scale before they get started with whatever Keith thinks he’s doing. Ideas swarm into Shiro’s mind like a plague of locusts, but that’s ridiculous… All of those notions are so weird and unlikely that they deserve no serious consideration… Sure, Keith’s gotten visibly pear-shaped in Shiro’s absence, but there’s no way that any of what he’s thinking is going to come true, Keith _cannot_ be thinking about doing what Shiro’s imagining…

That wouldn’t make any sense, Keith planning to shoot a clip like what Shiro’s thinking. Maybe Keith’s put on a little bit of weight—_Don’t kid yourself. It’s gotta be more than a _**_little_**_ bit_, Shiro’s garbage brain points out, _or else his ass wouldn’t look so full as that_—but the fact remains: Keith doesn’t make the kind of videos that Shiro’s thinking of. He just _doesn’t_—

Keith’s ass should’ve been the worst part of this, but then he turns around. He’s a bit preoccupied with unrolling the tape-measure, so he doesn’t notice Shiro staring yet. Shiro, on the other hand? He can’t avoid noticing the little belly that’s blossomed where Keith used to be slim and trim, no matter what he ever ate. Maybe he didn’t have eight-pack abs or anything, but he’d had _some_ definition to him, not to mention one of the smallest waistlines in The Gang.

Now, though? Shiro holds onto his jaw a hair too tightly. He scrapes a fingernail along his cheek. He presses his own backside hard against the edge of Keith’s desk, because these little bits of pain are helping convince him that he isn’t still in bed and dreaming. This is real life, not one of the inexcusably weird fantasies that Shiro’s worked to keep his friends from learning of, one of the kinky daydreams that he’s tried _so hard_ to keep repressed in the dark, wormy recesses of his mind, where they good and goddamn well belong.

No, of course it isn’t a dream, because why would it be. This is reality, and Keith is standing there in front of him with distinctly softer midsection, completely unconcerned with whether or not Shiro can see him in his full glory. No doubt, the flesh is more obvious when Keith’s sitting down or standing in profile—but there’s no missing the pudge that’s moved in around Keith’s middle, more obvious where his waist dips in but beautiful regardless of where Shiro’s eyes fall. There’s no mistaking the way that Keith’s stomach bulges out, or the way that the fullest part pushes against the straining waistband of his underwear.

In silence, Keith looks up from the tape-measure and blinks at Shiro. With a clearer head, Shiro can’t believe that he ever questioned whether or not Keith's cheeks have gotten fuller. True, the weight that he’s put on hasn’t hit his face as much as it’s filled out his hips and ass and tummy. Even so, there’s a bit of extra softness to his cheeks and a bit around his jawline. If Shiro didn’t know Keith better, he’d dare to call Keith’s face _cherubic_.

As if warning Shiro off of thinking anything like that, Keith looks up and his eyes flash like the edge of his Mom’s old heirloom knife.

“Yes?” Keith drawls, eyebrow quirking up again. “Are you… Can I _help_ you with something?”

“No—I mean, yes, but not like—Not like I’m trying to say, but then—I’m just, and you’re, and then I—” Shiro cuts himself off, clamping down on his own mouth again like he has a rag covered in some magical chloroform that keeps people from babbling like idiots.

Keith’s eyes go dull with how utterly unimpressed he is. “We’ve only got so long before we have to meet The Gang for dinner,” he points out, halfheartedly sneering, like he wants to emulate Lotor on a bad day but can’t make himself commit to the façade. “And Hunk’s gonna get home to clean up before that—”

Shaking off his hand, Shiro splutters, “Do we have a moment for me to _adjust_ here, though?”

“Adjust to _what_,” Keith snaps. “You’ve seen me in _way_ less clothing than this, before.”

The way that Keith folds his arms over his chest and screws up his lips could be adorable. The way that he impatiently cocks one of his hips could be the cutest thing that Shiro’s seen in months. The way that he shakes out his hair should be a familiar behavior that grounds Shiro in the present moment by doing what Keith’s always done—but everything about his posture and his expression put a sinking feeling in Shiro’s chest. His heart might as well have two ten-ton weights dragging it down, trying to yank the poor organ clean out of Shiro’s chest and giving it trouble with simply beating like it’s supposed to do.

Each beat that Shiro’s heart manages to get out carries a clear message: Shiro didn’t give Keith any warning about the changes to _his_ body before getting home. Shiro didn’t give Keith any time to adjust to the anything, or time to get used to the idea of Shiro coming home with abs. So, Shiro has no right to ask for the same thing out of Keith. At its absolute best, such a request is hypocritical as Hell, and Keith deserves infinitely better treatment from his so-called best friend.

“Sorry, I’m just—” Shiro bites on his lip. For want of something to do with his hands, he takes his hair out its ponytail. Tying it up again, he says, “I didn’t mean to, like? Not to insinuate any… I just mean?” He tugs his elastic, tightens his ponytail. “You look _different_, is all—”

“So do _you_,” Keith huffs as if he’s holding back whole encyclopedias worth of emotions.

“I’m not saying it’s a bad thing! It’s _your_ body, so not like my opinion matters, but? You look good, okay, Keith? You look _so_ good—”

“Well, _you_ look like you need to take your anxiety meds and eat a freaking sandwich—”

“I ate already. For _real_ this time!” Shiro shouldn’t hunch in on himself like this. Abs or no abs, posture is important and he knows better than to slouch. If nothing else, not minding how he stands is going to make his back hurt later, and will probably make Keith think he’s lying, in the short-term. “I haven’t skipped a meal in ten months, okay? And I didn’t do that on purpose. We had a really long day at the office, there was a backers’ party to plan—”

“You don’t have to _justify_ anything to me, Kashi,” Keith claps back, with a tone that all but outright begs Shiro to come up with a justification that Keith will actually accept. “It’s _your_ body, right? You’re allowed to do whatever you want, as long as it _makes you happy_.”

Shiro inhales sharply. His back tenses and his teeth grind on each other of their own accord.

There it is—there’s the rub that Shiro’s been expecting. Even if it’s only been Keith and Lance to get a preview of what he looks like with his eight-pack abs, one of them should’ve made this point already. Waiting to rub Shiro’s face in the question of his own happiness makes no sense, when this has been one of his friends’ most beloved refrains to undermine him with. All of them have been using it since the first time he tried to put himself on a diet. Some of them have been using it since the first time Shiro called himself fat like it was a bad thing when they didn’t think it was. Why would they suddenly learn restraint now that he’s finally managed to slim down?

Letting his eyes slip shut, Shiro nods. “It _does_. _Very _happy, actually,” he says, voice low and tight. He isn’t mad at Keith, not really. His heart twists guiltily, though, because Shiro should try to be softer about what he’s saying. But right now, he’ll settle for not being harsh. “You know what Elle Woods says about exercise and endorphins.” In case Keith doesn’t remember the line, Shiro starts, “_Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy_—”

“I know that you were supposed to be working on fat acceptance, body positivity stuff with Ulaz before you left.” Keith gives up a heated sigh, sounding like a dragon who’d very much like to go set something on fire. “I know that you were _supposed_ to be working on being less of a _dick_ to yourself about your weight. And I know _you_ _promised_ to take care of yourself in California—”

“I _did_ take care of myself! Do you think I’d look like this _without_ taking care of myself—”

“I think you look like wanna go-go dance in a cage, hanging from the ceiling at a West Hollywood gay bar,” Keith tells him, blunt as an oncoming train like always. “But you’re probably one of the backup guys, and the club’s manager won’t let you dance if he thinks you’re getting even a little bit soft. So, you’re at the gym for at least two hours every day and you haven’t treated yourself to a strawberry milkshake in at least six weeks. That sound about accurate, Kashi?”

“That… sounds like a suspiciously specific analogy?” God, why does Shiro’s mouth have to feel sticky and heavy and impossibly slow, like he’s been shot full of Novocaine? But Keith deserves a better answer than that, so Shiro tells him, “Cutting out sweets entirely was counterproductive. Sophie and Dr. Carter—the nutritionist and general practitioner I saw? They said that trying to make sweets forbidden was part of why so many of my previous diets _backfired_ like the did—”

“Oh, so you mean like exactly what me and Hunk and Ryou and _everybody_ has been telling you for_ years_ already?”

Shiro purses his lips. He wants to argue, but he’s _earned_ a reaction like that, especially out of Keith. Instead of snapping, he nods. He swallows his objections, no matter how fair they feel to him, and takes this criticism on the chin.

“Yeah. Just like that. You were completely right,” he says, forcing himself to stay calm because Keith hasn’t done anything wrong. Even if he _had_, Shiro probably doesn’t have the right to be upset about any of this. “So, I’ve been working out. Learning. I’ve been going more for, like? Moderation. Paying attention to serving sizes. Cooking for myself—I’m not a menace in the kitchen anymore, so the apocalypse is probably coming up on us, y’know? But…”

Sighing, Shiro makes himself look Keith in the eye as he admits, “You’re also right about the strawberry milkshakes. I haven’t had one of those in probably six _months_.”

More than probably. Shiro _definitely_ hasn’t had a strawberry milkshake in the past six months.

More than six months, even. He hasn’t had one of his favorite indulgences since the date he somehow landed for Valentine’s, last year. He took it out of his own ass at the gym, adding an extra half-hour to his workouts for the next ten days after that date—but Shiro drank the stupid thing, which is the only thing that Keith directly asked about.

Keith shrugs at this, but keeps frowning. “As long as you’re _happy_, okay?”

“I’m feeling _so_ much better, you have no idea.” No matter how much he currently feels like one of the stains on the bottom of a gas station microwave, Shiro straightens his back until he feels like he’s had a rod fused to his spine. “I’m just… I’ve got more energy without lugging all that extra weight. I can _breathe_ better, I’m not getting winded all the time—”

“You didn’t get winded all that often before. Of all people, I think I’d know—”

Shiro shakes his head and continues as if he hasn’t heard Keith: “I’m not so stiff, either—like, my hands and spine feel great? And my knees? Dr. Carter had me get them looked at so I’d stop worrying about that being a sign of something bad, and the orthopedic specialist couldn’t find hardly _any_ of the old inflammation. My _allergies_ got better? I can actually eat blueberries without getting sick—”

“That sounds nice—”

“It _is_—”

“Hay fever’s probably going to kick your ass, come springtime—”

“I don’t know, it didn’t catch me last year—”

“But I can’t help but notice that all of these things are _physical_ differences, _Kashi_.” Keith squares his shoulders. Shifts his weight from one foot to the other (and God help him, Shiro can’t help staring at the way Keith’s stomach wobbles). Squinting, Keith looks Shiro in the eye, and an arctic chill jolts down Shiro’s spine, harder than it went in from hearing Keith drawl that particular nickname. “I asked you if, after everything you’ve done to get here, you were actually _happy_ like this.”

Shiro forces his back to stay as rigid as possible. “I _am_ happy. I’m proud of myself, and I’m _so_ happy.”

This should clear things up so they can get to work. Shiro and Keith _should_ be able to leave well enough alone, after this promise.

Proclaiming his happiness kicks Shiro in the ribs with steel-toed boots, though, because it might not be as true as he wants it to be. Or it might not _stay _true, at any rate. So, he tries to give Keith a smile instead. It feels impossible—and yet, meeting Keith’s eyes this time makes something inside of Shiro’s melt. The smile comes up on its own. Maybe it’s a bit too dewy-eyed, and maybe it wobbles a bit too much for Keith to believe that the smile is legitimate. But even when Keith’s mad at him like this—and even when Shiro knows that he deserves it—he is so unbelievably lucky to be here with Keith, the guy who he loves most.

“At least you really do look good, Keith,” he says softly. “Whatever you’ve been doing for yourself lately, it’s… You’re still so beautiful that it’s downright unfair.”

Cheeks twinging pink, Keith nods. “Thanks. And I mean, it’s not like… I wasn’t saying—you look good, too—”

“You don’t have to lie about my abs if you don’t like them.” Shiro makes his lips quirk up again, struggles to hold them in place. He smiles, even though it feels like his heart’s getting trampled in a mosh-pit. “Just because I like them doesn’t mean that _you_ need to—”

“It’s not that I don’t _like_ them,” Keith cuts in, face flushing even brighter. “I’m just—I need time to _adjust_ to them, okay?”

Shiro nods for Keith, because that’s fair enough. And he understands this need of Keith’s, he does. Surprising everyone with his body—Shiro probably should’ve given this more thought. Should’ve given more consideration to how some of his loved ones handle surprises in general. Should’ve done more to get into their perspectives, to think about how his new and improved physique might go over in _reality_, rather than in the daydreams that might have had more basis in what Shiro _wanted_ to happen instead.

Except there’s no going back, now. Texting a warning to the others before dinner probably won’t do anything to help. Even if Shiro included a selfie, someone might have the same reaction that Lance did: accusing him of finding a _skinny doppelgänger_ to stand in for him so he can pull a ludicrous practical joke and have everybody on. If he’d kept them abreast of the situation before now, then they might believe him—but Shiro didn’t do that, and he can’t take that back. All that he can do now is live with the consequences.

All that he can focus on is what’s before him, right now, in this moment.

Smiling at Keith—giving him the soft expression that Shiro saves exclusively for him, whether Keith realizes this or not—Shiro wishes that his lungs would calm down with this feeling like he has a slimy, thousand-legged something worming around inside of them. God, if he’s getting sick from someone on the flight, Shiro’s going to scream into a pillow. Or, more likely, he’s going to hit the gym and work off the stress until he feels more like a functional human person. Not that thinking about this gives him any help with Keith.

At least Shiro keeps his smile up just fine. “Take as long as you need to get used to them,” he says gently. “But in the meantime, we’ve got work to do.”

“Yeah, uh…” Keith eyes Shiro like he isn’t sure what’s going on. “D’you want me to, like? Go over the idea, for you?”

Shiro nods. “Whatever works best for you. I’m at your disposal.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Questions I ask myself not-irregularly about this fic, “Does it count as slow-burn if it’s not that they’re taking a long time to get together but they ARE taking a lot of words?” and, “Does it count as slow-burn if they start doing kinky shit and shooting porn together before anybody says jack squat about feelings?”
> 
> Also, this chapter features stuffing, belly rubs, Keith feedist dirty-talking at his imagined audience for a video, and Shiro being an impulsive dumb-ass who makes extremely questionable life-choices with repercussions that he isn’t considering because that would require him to think about them, first.

_“Party At 200 Pounds.” Akira’s been letting himself go for months now, losing the skinny boy he used to be in so much soft, squishy flab. He couldn’t be happier to be plumping up, but how chubby has he gotten, really? After a moment of truth with his trusty scale and some measuring tape, Akira tries on some of his favorite outfits, to see if he can still wear them. Then, he treats himself to some takeout in celebration of a milestone. Stuffing clip, contains fat talk, belly play, and (in the uncut version) a special surprise at the end._

* * *

Keith’s idea proves Shiro wrong about something more than how people would react to his abs. Apparently, in the past few months, Keith _has_ started making the videos that Shiro’s thinking of. The sorts of videos that Shiro keeps hidden in an encrypted cache on one of his external hard drives because watching porn is one thing, but watching porn of people eating and/or measuring how fat they’ve gotten? That’s a completely different mess.

More than that, some of Keith’s regular subscribers have been shelling out good money for them. To hear him tell it, he’s been getting more than he ever got for fucking himself with dildos so big that you could see them through his formerly slim tummy. If he didn’t actually enjoy his day-job, Keith might’ve been able to give it up, all because he started selling clips of himself eating ice cream, pinching at the chub around his middle and jiggling his increasingly squishy thighs, or talking about how much he eats on any given day and how much weight he’s been putting on.

“Professionally speaking, I’m not, like, super into making them?” he explains, digging around the bottom drawer of his dresser, once he’s laid out today’s plan for Shiro. “But that just means I haven’t made that many of them, yet. More are coming. Because I enjoy making these videos. They’re probably the second-best thing that came out of breaking my ribs.”

_I really like the idea of you making them, too, _Shiro doesn’t allow himself to say because there’s a time and a place for everything—and it’s probably really tacky to admit that you’re hot for and in love with your best friend while getting ready to shoot his amateur porn for him.

“What was the first-best thing,” Shiro says, for want of something to keep the conversation going. “The fact that you put on some weight in the first place?”

“Pretty much.” With a few choice pieces picked out, Keith slams the drawer.

_Well, I can’t relate to that at all, baby, but_—“I’m glad that it worked out for you, then. Though I still kinda wish that you hadn’t gotten hurt.” Which is all that Shiro needs to say. He should stop talking. He should keep anything else to himself, lest he go and give Keith any untoward ideas, or—“Because, honestly? You’re creative. I know that, if you were interested and you put your mind to it, you could’ve found ways to put on weight _without_ getting injured.”

“That’s the thing, though,” Keith says as he drops the clothes he wants on his mattress. “I _wasn’t_ interested, at first. I never would’ve thought about it on my own—and I mean? If you hadn’t dated Lotor and Sendak, I never would’ve known that this kink was a thing.”

“Careful with the wires, baby,” Shiro reminds him as Keith stretches out. The audio recorder is around Keith’s lower back, clipped onto his boxer briefs as always. The mic, Shiro’s taped to Keith’s neck, close to his jaw but somewhere that his hair might keep it mostly out-of-sight. “I’m glad you’re happy about this? I just don’t wanna have to splurge on fixing the mic. Or worse? On buying new ones.”

Keith nods in understanding and motions for Shiro to turn on the cameras. “More than happy, Shiro. It was crazy, but like? I mean, I have to tell a version of this for the clip, but it has to be _Akira_ talking, not _me_, and I just…”

Sighing softly, Keith meets Shiro’s eyes. That alone indicates how serious Keith is about whatever’s on his mind. Usually, he doesn’t meet anybody’s eyes, if he can help it. Making direct eye-contact like this makes Keith’s skin start crawling, and that’s on one of his better days. He probably doesn’t intend to pout, the way he’s doing. He probably doesn’t mean for his blue-violet eyes to go so wide, either, or for them to look like Keith’s been holding this confession inside of himself for far too long and he _needs _someone to understand him.

Shiro doesn’t know if he will or if he can—but he nods anyway, by way of telling Keith to please go on.

“After I gained the first ten pounds,” he says. “Even though it really wasn’t a lot? It _felt_ like a lot to me…”

Shiro doesn’t let himself point out how much sense this makes to him. Between Keith’s height, his compact frame, and how much trouble he’s had with keeping on any weight that he’s gained before? Of course his first ten pounds would feel like a lot. Relative to how things have gone for Keith, putting on ten pounds is kind of huge. Having them stick around likely rocked his world.

Keith tongues at his lips, then applies a coat of chapstick before going on. “So, I noticed those ten pounds. But even more than that, though? I felt _better_. Which seemed _crazy_ because I didn’t even notice that I’d felt _bad_, y’know what I mean?”

Shiro nods, not meaning to give Keith an actual answer. Except Keith looks at him expectantly, so Shiro tells him, “That’s not uncommon? When people are used to feeling bad, it takes a lot more for them to notice. Or it takes them feeling _good_ and having that feels different from their usual, which makes something _click_ for them—”

“Yes! That’s exactly what I mean!” Holding up one of his favorite t-shirts, Keith beams at Shiro like he’s having one of his reckless impulses that will give them a good story, as long as it doesn’t kill them first. “And I felt better, but I didn’t really put words on it. Not until Allura and Lance were like, ‘Oh, gaining ten pounds isn’t that bad. You look fine, Spitfire. Maybe a little thicker, but you can’t even really _tell _that you’ve put on weight’—and I was just like? ‘Okay, but what if I _want_ people to be able to tell?’”

_I must have died_, Shiro keeps to himself, lest Keith think that he came back from California all the way out of his entire gay mind. _That’s the only way that I can explain you talking like this while I’m supposedly not dreaming. I must’ve died, and now, I’m somewhere in the afterlife—_

“Then I kept putting on weight, and I felt even better—I’ve kept active, though.” He pales slightly, adding that last bit. “Sometimes, I pretend that I haven’t in clips, but? I’m not trying to be wildly unhealthy in the name of porn. Working out makes it harder to gain, but—”

“It’s okay, Keith,” Shiro tells him with a smile. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me. Gaining weight without staying fit probably wouldn’t have felt as good for you.”

“Well, anyway,” Keith mutters. “It’s weird, but it’s kind of awesome? Feeling like I actually belong in my own skin for once, y’know?”

Thankfully, Keith doesn’t wait for an answer to that question. Instead, he switches on the audio recorder and gets himself comfortable against his headboard. After a moment, he gives Shiro the nod that means he’s ready to get started. Closing his eyes, Keith takes a few deep breaths and combs his fingers through his bangs. He pushes them _just so_, a bit askew but artfully so. When he looks up at the center camera, Keith’s wearing the sharp-edged, off-kilter smirk that belongs to his pornographic alter ego.

For the time being, Keith Kogane has given way to Akira Crimson—at least as far as the camera is concerned. Settled in the Keith’s desk-chair, Shiro gives Keith the finger-guns that tell him he’s good to go.

“_Heeey_, everybody,” Keith drawls, letting his eyes gleam playfully, totally fitting the character he’s made up for himself. “It’s your boy, Akira. And I’m coming to you today with a cool announcement and some very special news… Some very special news about all this body that I’ve been getting…”

_What about your best friend coming home from California_, Shiro keeps to himself, watching Keith flip his hair back and drop his hands down to his tummy. He’s being petulant and petty, no doubt about it. But as Keith squishes some of the fat on his stomach between his palms, Shiro can’t help thinking, _Your best friend came home after eighteen months. And he gets it, what you’ve been going through, with feeling better in your own skin. Even if you think that he doesn’t and he can’t—_

“Well, I promised that there’d be something cool up my sleeve when I hit my first big gaining milestone,” Keith says, pinching at a decently sized roll. “And I finally hit it the other day, _soooo_…” He shrugs as if asking whether or not any of this is his fault. “We’re gonna have a little party to celebrate all the progress that I’ve made. Turning into such a chubby, greedy fat boy…”

“Shift your legs a bit?” Shiro purses his lips at the center camera’s preview screen. He keeps his voice low enough that the mic shouldn't pick him up and tells Keith, “Lower the one you’ve got curled up… Let it just flop to the mattress, it’s kinda getting in the way of your stomach…”

Keith takes the note without nodding or saying anything. To cover up how he’s getting direction, he waggles his eyebrows and smirks at the camera. He ducks his chin in the exact right way to make the little bit of pudge around his jawline pooch out and get more visible. God, the sight of it makes something prickle in the back of Shiro’s throat. He swallows, which shakes it loose—but he can’t shake off the thought of kissing Keith all over his beginner’s double-chin… Sucking on his warm, soft flesh… Giving him hickeys absolutely everywhere—

“Before we start, though?” Keith flashes the cameras a grin. As he teases the future viewers, he traces his fingers up and down his midsection. He doesn’t quite jiggle his starter-belly, but he won’t let anyone ignore it, either. “I first hit two-hundred pounds a couple days ago. So, how about we check the scale first, huh? Just to see if I’ve gotten any bigger… I’ve been eating well this week, even with that milestone behind me, so you never know… Here’s hoping that I’ve added a few more pounds, ‘cause I can’t wait until I start getting really, properly fat…”

Shuffling around the mattress and (nominally) heading for the scale, Keith takes care to cheat toward the camera. Thank God, Keith knows his angles. He gets into position exactly how he should, and Shiro’s going to have a hard time choosing how to edit this later. The camera at Shiro’s right gets a good view of his back-rolls and his baby love-handles. The camera at Shiro’s left gets a glimpse of his tummy-pudge pooching out as he leans over. The camera in the center gets a three-quarters view of him, and eventually a profile.

Maybe he isn’t _fat_ yet, but _God_, Keith’s profile is a thing of beauty. His stomach looks so much rounder from the side, even though Keith’s really not that chubby, yet. If he’s serious about gaining more weight, though, then he’s only going to get bigger. Rounder and softer, fuller and plumper, with rolls of warm, plush fat pooching out along his curvy hips, his pudge sides, and his beautiful, expanding belly—

Taking deep breaths, Shiro thankfully keeps himself from gasping. Watching Keith closely, Shiro repeats Ojiisan’s old mantra in his head, by way of keeping himself grounded: _Patience yields focus… Patience yields focus… Patience. Yields. Focus…_

It doesn’t make him feel less lightheaded. But at least Shiro isn’t blushing or distracting Keith.

Hell, the viewers probably won’t be able to tell that _Akira_ has a director in the first place. All they’re going to see is their gorgeous gainer boy tantalizing them. As much as Keith _does_ need to get on the business of weighing in—and taking footage of it with his phone, for Shiro to edit into the video later—he takes advantage of the moment. Sitting up straight, Keith arches his back so that he pushes his tummy out while also playing up his back-rolls. He could probably make them even more visible, but they look perfectly fine as is.

With a warm sigh like a contented cat rolling around in a sunbeam, he rubs his hand over the curve of his belly. He jostles his chub, but not too much. Enough that Shiro can see how his flesh moves, but the gesture looks affectionate, as if Keith’s being touched by someone who really loves him—

“_God_, that’s so good, baby,” Shiro says before he can think to stop himself.

Keith shoots him a knowing smirk in response—_No, Hell, he’s smirking at the camera, not at me, why would he be smirking at me_—and his eyes glimmer. He makes a blush flare up on Shiro’s cheeks, and that just makes Keith smirk that much harder. He pinches a roll of chub along his stomach, grips onto it hard enough that he gasps. No doubt, Keith’s overselling it somewhat, but the moan that follows sounds genuine.

“Oh, I _definitely_ think I’ve gained a few more pounds,” Keith says, rubbing at his middle. “I’m feeling so soft and pudgy, lately… I wish I had somebody here who could feel up my body… Get their hands all over my tummy, and my love-handles, and my ass and thighs… Then, they could tell me if I’m feeling any bigger in their hands or not…”

_You have someone sitting right here who would love nothing more than that_, Shiro keeps to himself, glancing toward the window as Keith slips off the mattress.

Not that he can see anything. They have a black bed-sheet hanging up so the natural light can’t mess up the scene. But staring at the sheet is better than watching while Keith fumbles with his phone and toes at the scale to turn it on. The view of his back is beautiful. Even out of the corner of Shiro’s eye, Keith’s ass still looks utterly delectable and his love-handles beg for somebody to squeeze them. Shiro shouldn’t be taking any of what Keith says seriously, not while he’s in character as Akira.

Even so, Shiro can’t help thinking, _I would give up so many things if you would let me touch you._

“Moment of truth time, y’all,” Keith sing-songs. That part of Akira’s character is more affected than others. Keith, himself, can certainly be playful and provocative. But this kind of teasing—playing up this borderline slutty act and trying to get people wound up with it—is something that Keith normally doesn’t do. He has other ways of teasing people, and personally? Shiro much prefers the Authentic Keith behaviors.

The soft gasp he gives up after a moment, though? That is absolutely genuine.

“Oh… Oh, man,” Keith says, a bit thickly. Whatever he’s seeing, it’s right up on the cusp of making him break character. “Uh, wow, I… I mean, I thought I’d put on a few more pounds? But not like—are you guys seeing this? Y’know what, here, we’re gonna check again…”

The scale creaks as Keith climbs off, and dimly, Shiro wants to throw it down their building’s trash-chute. For the love of all things holy, Keith’s only in the ballpark of two-hundred pounds. Shiro has no idea how much Hunk weighs. As a former big guy himself, Shiro knows better than to ask a question like that. Still, he clocked in at almost twice Keith’s weight before he left for USC. Four-hundred-and-thirty-five pounds, all of it blubber, and every single ounce of him glad that their old scale supposedly maxed out at four-fifty. There’s no call for the scale to protest like that when Shiro _knows damn well_ that it has handled bigger weights than Keith’s.

A couple moments and some more creaking later, Keith sighs heavily.

“Same result,” he announces, sounding half-triumphant and half-embarrassed. “And wow, you guys are getting breaking news before my blog hears anything? I promise that I won’t tell them there—not unless they’re one of my Gold or Platinum-tier subscribers, of course. But, hey…” Keith forces a chuckle and somehow, he manages to make it sound legitimate. “Your boy Akira? Has gotten himself up to two-hundred-and-_three_ pounds, y’all. Plus another half-a-pound, too!”

Shiro purses his lips so tightly that it starts to hurt. Uncomfortable, yes—but at least he keeps his mouth shit. At least he doesn’t tell Keith that there’s only a seven-pound difference in their weights anymore. At least Shiro keeps himself quiet as Keith sits on the edge of his mattress, grinning and shaking out his hair. He takes a second to ham it up at the camera again, wiggling a bit and cheating so that his tummy-pudge is clearly visible from all three cameras’ vantage points.

“Can you even _believe_ how big I’m getting,” Keith says, faux-innocently. This time, he picks the camera to Shiro’s right as his focal point. He still gives the center camera a full-on frontal shot of his torso, but he pouts at the one on the right and tells it, “God, and to think I used to be such a skinny boy? I weighed in at _barely_ a buck-fifty when I started pigging out and gaining weight, just letting myself _go_ like this…”

He sighs as if he’s _so put-upon_ with and exasperated by his weight gain—but the smirk that lights up his face makes it clear that Keith is enjoying himself. He’s playing Akira, who’s affecting another caricature in turn. God, Lance and Lotor could probably write a collaborative dissertation on all the different levels of performance going on right now, and it might even turn out pretty good.

But fluttering his eyelashes, Keith is so much more enthralling than whatever Lance and Lotor could cook up.

“You all know what they say, though, right?” Quirking his eyebrows, Keith sinks his fingers into his tummy-pudge and moans. He turns his smirk to the left-hand camera and tells it, “You can’t judge your weight gain by the numbers alone. Good thing for us, I’ve got some of my old favorite clothes ready to try on for y’all… Let’s give it a try, huh? We can see how much they _don’t_ fit…”

Drumming his fingers on the mattress, Keith pretends to think about the situation in which he’s found himself. He pretends to consider something. Then, he pretends to have forgotten the tape-measure until he spots it again and faux-gasps—

“Oh, hmmm, that’s certainly an idea,” Keith tells the center camera. “Don’t you think that we should figure out how big around I’ve gotten? You wanna watch me measure my waistline?”

_I think we should, for sure_, Shiro doesn’t allow himself to say. Letting that slip wouldn’t help either him or Keith. Most likely, it’d throw Keith off his game, more than anything. Given that this is _work_ for him? Shiro can’t let himself do that.

“God, I don’t even know if I _want_ to know how big I’m getting, not like this…”

As he glides back up to his feet, Keith’s tone makes the lie obvious—but in all the videos like this that Shiro’s ever watched and tried to repress immediately thereafter? The lying is part of the fun. Part of the teasing. The viewers know that Keith is into this, and they _know_ that he enjoys his gaining. But pretending to be reluctant leads them on while handing Keith a free excuse to talk about what’s happening in excruciating detail.

Tapping at the side of his tummy, jiggling his faintly stretch-marked flesh, Keith says, “I’m putting on so much weight, you guys… None of the clothes I’ve picked out are gonna fit, I’m sure of it… Thinking about the number on the scale, well, I mean…” Keith pouts at the camera and uses both hands to push his chub out even further. “No wonder all of my pants have been getting so _tight_ on me, y’know? Like, _God_, I knew that I was getting kinda chunky, but I didn’t know I’d be up another three pounds from when I tipped the scales at two-hundred… The way things have been going with me? Soon enough, nothing’s gonna fit me at _all_…”

Shiro stifles so many objections, watching Keith shove his pudge toward the camera and shaking it. Having busted more than his fair share of buttons and split more seams, Shiro shouldn’t get any lumps welling up in his throat like he’s getting from the mere thought of that happening to Keith. It’s bad enough that he watches videos and animated .GIFs of it happening to other people. How can he wish it on his best friend, period?

A sharp smack sends a ripple through Keith’s chub. It jerks Shiro out of his own thoughts, besides—and before Shiro knows which way is up, Keith’s looping the tape-measure around his waist. He hums pensively, twisting and shaking his hips. That makes his tummy quiver again, and he throws a mock-pout at the center camera as if he’s saying, _Oh, wow. Of course I didn’t mean to do that, I would absolutely never. It was an innocent mistake by little ol’ me. Who ever could have known that this would happen?_

“I’m _so_ not used to having all of this pudge, y’know,” Keith says with an affected sigh. “It’s still so weird to me… My thighs are so plush and jiggly, and they chafe against each other when I’m walking… My hips are rounding out way too much to fit most guys’ jeans—I mean, come on. I knew that I had a nice butt before? But I had no idea that I’d end up so pear-shaped if I ever put on extra weight… Then, of course, there’s this belly I’m getting… God, it’s only gonna get bigger, with how I’ve been going…”

_Baby, please_, Shiro muses, crossing his legs._ Don’t make promises you don’t want to keep—_

When the trembling around Keith’s middle finally calms down, he pulls the tape-measure into place. As he fusses with it, he pretends to focus—but he undercuts that otherwise masterful façade by continuing to tease his future audience: “Not too long ago, my waist _barely_ clocked in at twenty-eight inches. And that was on a _fat_ day for me, back then… Most of the time, I was _under_ the twenty-eight-inch mark. Not by much, but by _enough_… Can you even imagine?”

Shiro hugs himself because, unfortunately, he _can_ imagine what Keith’s waistline used to look like. He remembers how, when Keith corseted for some of his older clips, Shiro could wrap his hands all the way around his middle. He remembers Keith struggling not to fall out of skinny jeans after a flu knocked him on his ass. But from the look of things, the black pants sitting on Keith’s bed cannot possibly fit him anymore. If Keith even gets them up his thighs, then there’s no way that he’ll be able to get them zipped and buttoned. He’ll need to shimmy and jump with everything that he’s got in him, and suck in like his life depends on it, and no matter what he does, he’ll end up with rolls of chub squashing down his straining waistband.

Which isn’t a helpful thought at all, so Shiro keeps it to himself. He chokes back on the huff that wants to rush out of him. Yet, he can’t ignore the way that Keith pulls the tape-measure too tight around his waist, or the way that it cuts into his pudge. Keith hisses at himself or possibly his tool—_“Oh come on, I have not_ _gotten _**_that_**_ big yet, I know I haven’t, and not for lack of trying…”_—and as he tightens the wrap, he inhales sharply and whines as if he’s actually uncomfortable. If Shiro hadn’t heard that same whine from Keith when he didn’t feel like doing his homework or considering Lance’s perspective about something, he’d believe that Keith is hurting himself with his attempts at finding a smaller number on the tape-measure.

It’s a great act, but one part of it demands Shiro’s attention more than any other. For a moment, Keith sucks in his stomach hard and tugs the tape-measure to the smallest point he can get. He exhales with a heavy sigh. He lets his belly surge back out. He holds on tight, so he won’t loosen the would-be vise around his waist. Rolls of chub pooch out over the yellow line around Keith’s middle, drawing Shiro’s eyes straight to them. True, they aren’t very _big _rolls, not by any stretch of the imagination, but there’s enough meat to them for Keith to pinch up a little handful along his side. There’s enough pudge for him to grab a larger handful around the middle of his stomach. There’s enough soft, inviting chub that it droops ever-so-slightly over the tape-measure and makes Shiro’s entire mouth go dry.

As if he has no idea what he’s been doing, Keith pouts at the center camera while he sets his middle free. “Sorry, everybody,” he coos, tracing his fingers up and down the fullest part of his tummy. “I thought I could maybe still rein this bad boy in, y’know? Give it my all and see a twenty-eight again—without using one of my corsets, I mean… But, oh well…” Keith grabs up a handful of belly-fat again and shakes it. “I guess I just underestimated how much I’ve been letting myself go…”

Shiro shifts uncomfortably, but tries not to move too much. For one thing, he can’t distract Keith—much less reveal himself, his kinks, or the threats his dick was making—all because he didn’t bother to control himself. For another, though, he knows too well how easy it is to put on weight without even noticing how much until confronted with the evidence. How quickly an attempted diet can fall by the wayside, constantly procrastinated, until finally, it’s three months later and he’s getting lunch and busts the button off his jeans.

The thought of Keith doing the exact same thing makes a blush creep onto Shiro’s cheeks. But if Keith notices before Shiro manages to pull it back, then at least he doesn’t break character. At least he doesn’t point out anything that Shiro’s doing.

“Okay, okay,” Keith sighs, almost resolutely, readying the tape-measure. “We’re gonna do this again. And no games this time, either. I promise. I’m not gonna shaft anybody out of an _honest_ measurement. Not when you guys have supported me so much while I’ve been porking out, not when you’ve all been treating me _so good_…” 

Keith doesn’t need to whine on those last two words as if he’s begging to get bent over a desk or pinned against a wall. But it’s what _Akira_ would do, and as Keith adjusts the tape-measure again, his eyes glimmer like he’s enjoying himself. Based on his confession, he probably is.

Based on what he’s showing off, Shiro would no doubt enjoy himself, if only he could be allowed to get his hands on Keith’s body. All hope of covering his entire waist is gone by now. In all likelihood, not even a suffocating corset could cinch Keith down enough for that.

But it’s no great loss. Touching Keith’s body in its full glory, appreciating all the weight he’s gained so far, exactly as it is? That would be infinitely better.

Feeling up his middle, Shiro would probably find no traces of the abs Keith used to have. He’d be warm in Shiro’s arms, of course; he always has been. His chubby stomach and pudgy sides would be so pliant under Shiro’s hands. The mere thought of that makes Shiro’s heartbeat stutter, makes his lungs rustle as if something inside of them yearns to break free. Shiro could massage Keith’s belly for him. He could rub Keith down, and grab up handfuls of his extra padding, and feel just how doughy he’s gotten lately. He could press down on Keith’s thighs with his own, letting Keith feel how hard Shiro’s muscle is against his flab. He could grope Keith’s plump, thick ass, squeezing it two-handed, and sighing as he lost his hands in something soft—

On the inhale, Shiro’s breath tries it’s damnedest to hitch in his throat. Thankfully, he muffles a cough in his elbow and kick-starts his lungs again. Reaching for the tune of chapstick on Keith’s desk, Shiro makes himself keep breathing. Deep, slow, steady, measured. Nothing to distract Keith or upset himself. Not even when when Keith smiles at the camera and says he can’t show anybody his results yet because that number on the tape-measure can’t be right. He just needs a moment to do this one more time…

“Gotta make sure we _really _get this right, y’know?” He quirks his eyebrows in a way that says he’s in on the joke—and signals to Shiro that he should use the center camera’s zoom. “God, to think I used to be so _skinny_. I know I’ve been saying that I could get on a diet and lose it all over again, and get back to how I used to be—but you guys? I’m not sure I could manage anymore… I might’ve gained too much weight for that…”

This time, Keith doesn’t screw around. He’s had enough of the foreplay. Minding the preview screen, Shiro zooms in on Keith’s waistline and the tape-measure. When he gives Keith a nod, Keith settles on a number. He gives up a gasp as well, and it might actually be genuine. If not for his resolve to avoid interrupting Keith’s process, Shiro would probably join Keith in that.

“Oh… Oh, man, I mean…” Keith starts, then trails off into licking his teeth. “Thirty-six inches…”

Not that Shiro can blame Keith for being startled by that result, or shocked into practically dropping character. If not for the earnestness that people usually attribute to Akira—if not for the way that Keith’s woven pieces of alter ego from these little lapses back into reality—Keith would for sure be out of character. Considering how slim Keith’s been until very recently, Shiro gets why he’s taking the result like this. But Shiro can’t let himself get distracted any more than he can afford to distract Keith.

Focusing on the work at hand—that’s the only trick that Shiro has up his sleeve. If his brain keeps trying to trip him up on thoughts of what Keith’s body might feel like, dedicated focus on the work might be the only thing that he can fall back on. Come Hell or high water, that level of attention is _going_ to get Shiro through this process. Once he gets the shot he needs of the results, he gives Keith a nod and starts pulling back the shot.

Keith takes a deep breath as he unfurls the tape-measure. As he wraps it up again, Keith says, “Well, I guess I really _did_ underestimate how big I’ve been getting lately… A full eight-inch gain? That’s definitely bigger than I expected…”

That really is Keith talking, too. Not Keith-as-Akira, but Keith as himself. Complementing what he has to say, Keith’s whole face is flushed bright pink and quickly slipping into a candy apple shade of red. It’s not even like Keith’s gotten _that_ big yet. Bigger than he’s ever been before, yes. But Shiro had a party over getting his waist back down to thirty-six inches. That took him months of dieting and working out. It’s taken him longer to whittle himself down to thirty-two inches, carving these abs out of the blubber that he had before. Looking at Keith, at the relatively slight bulge that he has to his midsection, Shiro see so much _potential_, so much room for further growth—

“There really is a lot of me to go around,” Keith says gingerly, palming at his stomach and his sides without jiggling them. Keith doesn’t even really try to showcase anything; he’s simply touching his own body for the sake of doing so. “Or anyway, there’s _getting _to be a lot of me… More than I’m used to having, that’s for damn sure…”

Silently, Shiro hopes that Keith doesn’t mind having a witness to this moment of vulnerability, that he doesn’t mind having it in the final clip. Because whether or not Keith’s subscribers will enjoy the sight of Keith with his hair falling _just so_, partially but not entirely obscuring his face? Shiro loves the way that Keith blushes right now. He loves the fact that he can _see_ Keith blushing, even if Keith would probably rather not be doing so. For a moment, Shiro can’t feel where his heart’s gone off to, because he’s gone so long without being close to Keith like this and Keith’s face—from his blush to the extra pudge filling out his cheeks—everything is more beauty than Shiro deserves.

_God, I would love to kiss the apples of those cheeks_—Shiro nibbles on his lower lip. Thankfully, it keeps him grounded enough that he doesn’t do anything stupid, anything ridiculous, or anything that could potentially ruin all the work that Keith’s putting into this video.

“But we’ve got more to do than listening to me wax philosophical,” Keith supposes with a flip of his head—just enough to get it back off his face—and a too-casual shrug that no one would believe. Palming at his stomach again—brushing up and down all of his new curves—he waits for the nod that says Shiro has enough footage of this moment. “We’ve gotta see what’s up with my wardrobe, right? And I mean, sure, I’m gonna need to get some new things soon, but in the meantime…”

Keith’s laid out so many good options for things that he can try on, three pairs of bottoms and three different tops. Any of them would be good to kick off this part of the video. As Shiro’s mind tries to picture how all of the possible scenarios could play out, he chews on the inside of his cheek and focuses on his breaths. Getting too wrapped up in his own imagination could lead to disappointment, if Keith has other ideas (and in all likelihood, he does).

Starting a bit more on the restrained end of the spectrum, Keith grabs up his old Dolly Parton t-shirt first. It has thin, cream-colored fabric with a brightly-colored picture of his favorite diva on the torso, and Shiro loves the way it looks on Keith. Rather, he loves the way it used to look. Before he went to California, this shirt never let Shiro forget how slim Keith was or how nice his abs were, even when he didn’t seem to work that hard on them. Tantalizing, tempting, and torturous to take in—but whenever Keith wore it, Shiro never wanted to look away.

Now, though, Shiro doesn’t know if _“love” _goes far enough for what he’s feeling—and Keith hasn’t even put the shirt on, yet. Showing it off and introducing it as one of his old favorites, he smiles faux-innocently at the center camera. His face might as well be saying that he _knows_ his Dolly t-shirt isn’t gonna fit him by most people’s standards, but he really doesn’t care. Not even that he’s putting on the façade of not caring, either. The gleam in Keith’s eyes suggests that Keith would wear it out in public at his current size, completely unconcerned with how it might show off his tummy or how most people think that he should cover up instead.

As Keith moves to hold the shirt in front of his middle, Shiro can see faint lines that have cropped up in Dolly’s portrait. In the right lighting, Keith could probably get away with acting like the aren’t there, but Shiro recognizes them for what they are. They’re like stretch marks for Keith’s t-shirt, evidence that he’s put on weight lately and it’s a struggle to contain him.

Pulling the shirt over his head doesn’t necessitate wiggling his hips. Still, doing that must make Keith happy and Shiro doesn’t have the right to argue. Moving like that, Keith jiggles his little belly, bouncing it from side to side and sending ripples all through his flesh.

As if that weren’t enough, he finds the right light and the right position to finally draw Shiro’s eyes up to his chest. Considering how his lower body’s filled out lately, it makes sense that Keith’s pecs haven’t softened quite as much as the rest of his body. Even so, they have an outward curve to them now when they never did before. He has inviting mounds of softness where he’s always had firm, flat planes, and Shiro has to bite back on a needy whine when Keith covers them up. Shimmying as he tugs the shirt into place—getting his flesh to wobble around again—makes up for denying Shiro the view he was enjoying.

At least it’s getting easier to keep his reactions bottled up where they belong. Watching Keith makes Shiro’s mouth go so dry that he could easily pass out from dehydration. But he doesn’t allow himself to make a sound. He might stare at Keith a bit more than he should, but right now, Shiro has a perfectly valid reason for that. Yes, he has a personal investment in the way Keith’s shirt stretches and creases and rides up on his belly—but Shiro’s also responsible for making sure that this video does everything that Keith’s clients and subscribers expect from him.

“Y’know, I don’t think this one’s really all that tight on me… A little bit snug, but it hasn’t gotten _that_ bad…” Keith muses aloud, running his fingers along the bottom of his shirt, then tugging so that the bottom hem meets the waistband of his underwear. His cheeks twinge pink and he faux-pouts as the shirt insistently creeps back up. “Okay, maybe it’s more than a _little_ bit snug, but I don’t know? I think I could still wear it out and about… Anyway, it’s such a _favorite_ of mine, y’know? I can’t imagine _ever_ giving it up…”

Whether that hint of a whine comes from a real place in Keith or not, he’s underselling what’s going on around his middle. That’s part of the game for him, Shiro guesses, and he can’t argue with the view. Not when he has to focus so intently on _not_ letting himself get hard, just from the sight of Keith like this.

All attempts at tugging the shirt down lead to it riding up again, leaving a strip of Keith’s pudge exposed. Across his torso, the cracks in Dolly’s screen-printed portrait are utterly unmissable, pushed open and made more visible as the fabric clings to and tries to cover a body that’s gotten too big for this top. This is worse around Keith’s waistline. His belly bulges and pooches out, straining against the cotton-blend prison that Keith’s forced himself into. With the fabric hugging him so tightly, the curves of his stomach demand attention. When he turns to give the center camera a full-view of his back, Keith’s love-handles seem like they might be bigger.

Of course, that’s ridiculous. Keith’s love-handles _can’t_ have grown any more since they’ve started filming—but between how the lights hit him and how his shirt fits? The pudge around his back and sides is brought into clearer relief. Nothing’s left to the imagination, and that makes Shiro’s cheeks and neck start heating up again. As Keith stretches his arms toward the ceiling—as he drags the shirt up higher and exposes more of his pale, cool-toned skin—Shiro’s just glad that Keith can’t see him blushing like this.

How he manages to calm himself down, Shiro has no idea. But when Keith turns to give him a profile view, Shiro’s face no longer feels so hot that it could start a fire. Hopefully, he isn’t red enough to notice, either. Inhaling deeply, Keith straightens up his back. He doesn’t suck in his stomach, but that shift in posture makes it look less pronounced—not _smaller_, exactly, but less self-insistent, making less of a spectacle out of itself—and with his tummy giving him that bit of leeway, Keith tugs the t-shirt closer to where it’s supposed to hit him.

Then, he sighs a heavy, faux-exasperated sigh. He wilts, slouching at the hips into a posture that comes to him more naturally. As he rolls his eyes, Keith’s belly flops back into its former place, sticking out and looking squishier than it has yet today. Bulging out in a curve that begs for someone to please come rub it for Keith. Pushing the t-shirt up as it tries to escape from a t-shirt that it obviously doesn’t appreciate being crammed into like this.

“What d’you think,” Keith says off-handedly, tapping his fingers around his belly-button and feigning a pensive sigh. With the shirt in the way, Shiro can’t see the quivers in Keith’s flesh as much as he could earlier, but the jiggle’s there. Staring at the wall, then at the right-hand camera, Keith jostles his chub as if he isn’t even thinking about it. “I mean, okay, I guess that it’s getting _pretty_ tight on me? But nobody’s said anything lately? So, I could still get away with wearing it, if I wanted to…”

_If anyone tried to stop you_, Shiro can’t stop himself from thinking, _then I’d put them in their place._

Unperturbed and blissfully oblivious to Shiro’s thoughts, Keith cheats his body so that the right-hand camera has a three-quarters view of him instead. “God, you know where I could wear this shirt out to?”

_I don’t know, that all-you-can-eat buffet a few towns over?_

“I could wear this out to a _buffet_!” Keith beams at the cameras, and Shiro has to pinch his own elbow. No, Keith is not reading his thoughts; there’s no way that he could be. They’ve had a moment of synchronicity, that’s all. With the way Keith traces little circles around his tummy, refusing to let attention drift away from its plumpness for too long, no wonder that they had the same thought about what scandalous things he could do in this shirt.

“Can you even imagine how that would go,” Keith almost-purrs, drumming his fingers along his middle in a way that makes his flesh quiver again. Watching this, in turn, makes Shiro feel like there’s an anvil crushing his chest and lungs—but Keith presses on, undaunted, rubbing both palms up the sides of his belly where it rounds out against its t-shirt prison, and giving bedroom eyes to the center camera.

“There’s a new buffet that just opened a few towns over from where I am, actually,” he says, pushing his stomach out even further. He doesn’t jostle it this time, just squishes his paunch and plays with it. “It’s all-you-can-eat, and it has a few different types of food, kinda multicultural… I’d love to wear this over there for a meal…” He lets go of his belly with a playful smirk. When it flops back into place, his t-shirt stays ridden up on him, nearly to his belly-button, exposing a strip of pudge.

Instead of tugging on the hem, Keith simply toys with it. “Look at how this shirt already fits on me…” He lets slip an _ooooh_, as if he’s having the best idea of his life. “If I went over to Biggerson’s and got on their all-you-can-eat special? I could go to town, just spend a whole evening eating whatever I want, stuffing this thing full of anything and everything… I wonder how much I could manage before I got too full. More than a couple months ago, I’ll tell you that much… I mean, you know that I haven’t packed on all this chub without having an appetite…”

Pressing on his belly isn’t necessary. Moaning over that bit of pressure isn’t necessary, either. Even given how much teasing like this is a part of Keith’s persona as Akira, Shiro’s certain that Keith could give it up for now, or go little easier on it and then move on. But even so, Keith digs his fingers into his belly-fat, and he gives up another moan, and he whines about how good his belly feels, now that he’s gaining weight and going soft… How he needs someone to feel him up _so badly_, because it’s such a crime that no one else gets to appreciate how Keith’s growing pudge feels in their hands…

Breath stuck in his throat, Shiro only keeps himself from getting hard by chewing on the inside of his cheek and gripping onto his knee. He focuses on his breathing and thinks about the first time he tried to wedge himself into a single airplane seat and realized that he’d need to either drop the weight or buy two tickets if he ever wanted to sit comfortably on a flight again. When Keith cops a two-handed feel of his own belly, pushing it toward the camera all over again and giving all that chub a shake, Shiro grabs his knee so hard that his fingertips are likely leaving bruises. But as long as he doesn’t get hard, that pain will be worth it.

It works for a couple moments, too. At least, that regimen keeps Shiro’s body from betraying him in the unmistakable form of an inconvenient boner. The pain and those humiliating memories keep Shiro from getting hard and letting Keith know how he feels at one of the worst possible times. Confessing that was part of Shiro’s plan, of course—but now Keith’s mad at him, which is more than fair. Keith’s only putting aside that anger for the sake of working together and making this clip. It isn’t that Shiro’s been forgiven—and he hasn’t done anything to apologize, so Keith _shouldn’t_ forgive him—or that Keith’s letting things go. He’s simply being _professional_.

The onus here falls on Shiro to keep himself in check. He does well enough while Keith feels himself up, and even when Keith strips out of that t-shirt. But the next thing that Keith gets off the bed makes Shiro’s entire mouth feel so dry that it could be a desert in its own right.

Smirking like the Devil himself, Keith faces the center camera head-on, holding up a pair of denim short-shorts that Shiro never thought he’d see again. In _any_ context, really, because Keith never used to like them. Back in undergrad, he only ever worse these things when he lost bets or volunteered to help out with charity car-washes. Still, the daisy dukes always looked delectable on him, back then. They always played up how toned and firm his thighs were, and gave people one of the best possible views of his perky ass.

As he holds them up to his waistline now, it’s clear that these shorts will absolutely not fit on Keith the way they used to. Not even in the slightest. All over, he’s filled out so much that his flesh goes past where the denim ends. His waistline is definitely bigger than the shorts’, and his hips and thighs look like they could split the side-seams right down their middles.

Judging from the wiggle in Keith’s shoulders and the eager, knife’s edge glint behind his eyes, Keith knows this. He expects for things to go that way. When he steps into the shorts and coaxes them up his legs, he faux-marvels at how easy getting them on is going—then gasps as if he’s actually surprised when he hits his first snag.

He’s about halfway up his thighs when he gets there. Things are going so well—Keith wiggles his hips every now and then, just to emphasize how chubby he’s becoming and let his viewers see that pudge in motion—and suddenly, the shorts stop moving. They catch in a place where his legs are particularly full, where the chub he’s gained there seems to jiggle more than ever. Whining and tugging the shorts by their waistband, Keith shimmies but gets nowhere. Jumping a bit doesn’t help him either. Both actions make his flabby thighs wobble. They shake his belly and make it bounce. Keith groans in earnest and grits his teeth, putting actual effort into this.

But as if they’re determined to make things difficult for him, the shorts refuse to budge.

With a sigh and a bashful, apologetic smile, Keith looks up to the center camera. “Maybe I should’ve tried these on for you guys _before_ I hit this milestone, huh,” he supposes. Taking one hand off the shorts, Keith jostles his belly again. “I mean, I thought for sure that the issue would be getting my shorts zipped and buttoned over this tummy that I’ve been gaining lately. I have to borrow clothes from my bigger friends to hide it anymore, but here we are…”

He keeps up the innocent façade as he bends forward, ostensibly reaching for his porky thighs. But he arches his back so that his belly will dangle down in front of him, and he twitches his shoulders again, which makes Keith’s pale flesh wobble as if it might never, ever stop. And _Jesus_, some part of Shiro wishes that it wouldn’t.

Covering his mouth with one hand, Shiro tries to banish the thoughts of how much further Keith’s belly might hang down when he gains more weight. He tries not to think about how Keith might feel in his hands, with how doughy and soft and plumped up he’s gotten. Gripping onto his jaw and his knee until he starts to hurt himself, Shiro tries to yank his mind back on track, toward his role as Keith’s director and away from wondering how Keith’s pudge will feel as he keeps gaining, if he’s as serious about that as he claims. He tries desperately not to think about the idea that maybe Keith can’t get his shorts up after all—

Except Keith winks. He flashes a grin so devious that it makes heat and lust and a rush of _oh-God-need-Keith-want_ twist around the pit of Shiro’s stomach. He swallows a heavy sigh so it won’t upset Keith while he’s working and God, it feels like Shiro might start choking. As Keith bunches the shorts up and tugs the fabric, his thighs jiggle. Somehow, through his shimmying, he manages to work them up higher and higher.

Shiro almost gasps when Keith gets the shorts up where they’re supposed to sit. How he holds it back is beyond him, really—but then again, Shiro’s reaction isn’t the important thing about this. What’s important is that Keith has his waistband around his waistline, where it belongs. No matter how much the fabric wrinkles up, riding higher as it strains to hold in all his flesh, and no matter how much his love-handles squish down on the waistband, Keith’s already won a major victory against these too-small shorts.

There’s no way that Keith can get them buttoned up, though. His tummy isn’t too big yet, but his pudge pushes the sides of Keith’s fly so far apart that Shiro can’t imagine how he’ll yank them back together. The denim cleaves to Keith’s flesh, bowing out in a wide, curved V shape where his stomach pooches out. For a moment, Keith sighs as if he knows that everything is pointless, as if he’s ready to give up and accept that he’ll never wear these shorts again.

Then, his eyes get that switchblade glint again. Curling his hands around the fly, Keith smirks in a way that screams, _Bring it on_.

As Keith wiggles his hips, Shiro needs to hold his breath. Each motion makes his thighs chafe up on each other. The denim around his legs creeps higher, letting Shiro see even more of that pale, wobbling pudge. But he can’t focus on that alone. Before Shiro knows what’s up, Keith tugs on his fly. He yanks the button and its hole closer and closer together. Even though he stands up straight, he doesn’t get them anywhere near closing, but he _grunts_ as he struggles with them. And he screws up his face in concentration. And yes, he lets a heavy, exhausted groan send his belly flopping forward again. But Keith recovers quickly, sucking in his beautiful stomach with all his might, trying to pull it back and put it in a self-inflicted cage.

It’s a valiant effort, and Keith’s cheeks are going slightly red. Still, the button won’t let Keith put it through the hole.

“Okay, _fiiiine_,” he sighs, slouching as he throws an exasperated glance toward the right-hand camera. Brushing his palm up and down his tummy’s pudgy, outward curve, Keith rolls his eyes like the most spoiled of teenage brats. “If I can’t get them standing up, then we’re just gonna need to get _creative_.”

Dimly, Shiro wants to point out that very little about Keith’s solution is _creative_. He settles on the mattress like so many chubby cam-boys who Shiro’s watched before, in the dead of night when no one else could’ve come to interrupt him. This moving around makes Shiro zoom in the center camera, and as Keith lies down, Shiro adjusts the left-hand camera’s zoom. The center camera has a good shot of Keith’s ass, of the way he spreads his legs and shows off his chubby thighs, sucking in even with gravity helping push his tummy down. God, he doesn’t _need_ to wiggle in the way he does. Not one to do things halfway, though, Keith makes his thighs jiggle and lets his knees fall apart like he’s already lubed and prepped and ready to get nailed into the mattress.

On the left-hand side, though, Shiro gets a better shot of Keith’s stomach. With him laid out on his back like this, his poor tummy can’t bulge out how it does otherwise. With Keith sucking in so hard as well, his midsection almost looks like he hasn’t put on any weight at all. Even from the side, his thighs betray his gains, rounding out and bouncing regardless of how nearly-flat Keith manages to get his midsection. Throat closing up with all of these desires that he can’t disclose, Shiro watches silently. He tries to think about how the white-balance looks on the camera’s little preview screen. _Not_ about how much he wants to straddle Keith’s thighs, kneeling and perching over him, jerking on those shorts and telling Keith to _come on, just suck in harder, baby_, helping him with this ostensibly insurmountable task.

But with another round of squirming and whining, Keith manages to get his button done without any help from Shiro. With that done, Shiro rushes to adjust the zooms, pulling them out so that he won’t miss anything when Keith gets to his feet.

How Keith manages to stand without his belly winning out against the shorts is another mystery, but Shiro will need to ponder it at another time. Watching Keith rock up on the balls of his feet and jump, Shiro loses track of everything outside this room. The way Keith’s chub shakes as he tugs the shorts up higher on his middle—God, that almost makes Shiro forget to check the zoom and the shot that the right-hand camera has going. Dropping one hand to the zipper, Keith inhales deeply.

Arguing with the zipper sounds about as fruitless as trees that have been hit by a plague of locusts. With the button done up, the denim of Keith’s shorts might as well be painted on his skin. The only hints that the fabric hasn’t fused to his body are the creases where Keith can’t get the shorts to flatten out again, and the way the zipper’s teeth curve out, leaving a roll of Keith’s chub practically hanging out. Each row of teeth sits so far away from the other one that Shiro’s heart twists around in sympathetic pain, writhing with the fear that Keith might not be as okay with this as he wants his audience to think.

There’s a sharp pang of desire in Shiro’s chest as well, but for all he chokes down both feelings, he can’t cut loose the memories of times when he’s been in more or less the same position as Keith is now. All the times when he ever found himself getting plumper and rounder, until he finally outgrew a pair of jeans. Shiro digs his fingertips into his elbow again, trying to stay focused on the present moment. He isn’t fat like that anymore, he got his act together out in California, maybe he’s a hypocrite or the worst for this, but his memories are only that—

Fortunately, Keith’s grousing jerks Shiro out of his own thoughts and back down to Earth. As he tries to get the shorts closed up, Keith keeps hitting snags. The zipper will click up one tooth, maybe two, and then, it always, always, always catches on some of Keith’s pudge. He does that three times until the zipper refuses to budge any further.

“Is it weird that I’ve been getting kinda used to this,” Keith mutters down at the zipper, and Shiro can’t figure if Keith’s addressing him or one of the cameras. Either way, Keith tells whoever might be listening, “Getting too big for my favorite clothes is kind of an exhilarating rush, don’t get me wrong? I love trying something on and finding that it won’t cover up all the pudge around my tummy… Or there was the time my old skinny jeans wouldn’t even get all the way up my thighs? I wish I’d been shooting that instead of trying to get to work, because they got stuck and then I burst the seams all up the thighs and holy _fuck_, it was _amazing_…”

Thank God that Shiro doesn’t gasp loudly enough for the mics to pick it up. He blushes more than enough when Keith looks at him. The playful smirk lighting up Keith’s face is adorable, and Hell, it makes Shiro want to go over there and kiss him. Pull Keith flush and tight against his body, feeling Keith’s plump little belly squishing up against his abs, and giving him the best, hardest, filthiest kiss that either of them has ever had in their entire, godforsaken lives.

But Shiro sinks in his seat anyway, skin crawling with the fact that Keith’s noticed him reacting. Best case scenario, it only throws him off for a moment. Worse case scenario, Keith either figures out that Shiro is a bigger freak than some of his subscribers. _Worst_ case scenario, most likely, Keith feels hurt, like Shiro’s judging him, or disgusted by him, or wishes Keith would lose the weight again because Shiro slimmed down himself, or—

_Or_ Keith could waggle his eyebrows like he and Shiro are both in whatever joke he has in mind. Shiro can’t even imagine what the joke could be. But then Keith grins at him, and he flips some hair back off his face, and he shakes his hips in a way that sends another ripple through all of that soft, delectable-looking flesh. Shiro struggles to keep breathing, but at least he doesn’t pass out and completely ruin this entire shoot after Keith’s gotten so far into it.

With a smirk that’s downright devious, Keith undoes the zipper. “D’you wish you’d been there to see that happen,” he says, feigning like he’ll lower his voice. He can’t speak too quietly or the mic won’t work, but Keith finds a register that sounds like he’s teasing at someone whom he knows intimately. It must be something that his subscribers love to hear in clips—but Keith doesn’t look at any of the cameras. The center one is closest to his eye-line, but he definitely isn’t looking where he’s supposed to look.

Inexplicably, Keith is looking at Shiro. Dead-on and direct, and God, he makes Shiro’s lungs clench up around themselves like they’ve developed a moral opposition to letting Shiro draw in breath. Like they don’t want to let him get any oxygen ever again, period.

“Are you sad that you missed out on watching me do that,” Keith says in that same oddly familiar voice, as if he’s speaking to a lover. “Because _I’m _sad that I didn’t have an audience for it. This luscious body’s taken me some work to get, y’know? And I didn’t expect my skinny jeans to do that to me—and I guess I _should_ have expected it? If not that day, then definitely _some_day around that point? It’s not like I didn’t _know_ that I’d put on weight, and those jeans were skin-tight on me even before I started blimping out…”

Shiro remembers vividly. Thankfully, Keith only had one pair of skinny jeans before Shiro left for California. They haunted Shiro back then, refusing to let him get any peace, tormenting him on a constant basis with how enviably slender Keith’s body used to be and reminders of how much Shiro wanted to touch him as a boyfriend but couldn’t.

Worse yet, Shiro can imagine how Keith might’ve looked, trying to wriggle into those pants after he started gaining weight. He can imagine Keith trying to squeeze into them now, too. He’d probably rip them up the crotch and not the thighs, this time. He’d probably get them up to his knees, maybe a little higher. Then, he’d move to peel the jeans up his legs and move in the exact _wrong_ way, and he’d end up with an enormous hole before he was even halfway dressed.

The worst thing, though, might be right here in this present moment. Keith watches Shiro as he brushes his fingers up and down the pudge that protrudes through the open zipper. There’s no glint in his eye, either. No teasing, only an earnestness that Shiro doesn’t understand. Is this a new development in Akira’s character that he missed out on? Is Keith somehow getting back at Shiro for something that he’s messed up lately?

Alright, no, that second idea is utterly ridiculous. Yet, as Shiro forces himself to meet Keith’s eyes—as the skin crawls on the back of his neck from how open Keith is being, and from the gentleness in Keith’s expression—he can’t think of any other explanations.

Or much of anything, really. Something’s hanging in the air between him and Keith, thicker and heavier than Shiro’s thighs were eighteen months ago, and it’s like every thought’s evaporated out of Shiro’s head. His heart stops and starts, seemingly at random, flapping wildly against his ribs as it struggles to just keep beating. Watching Keith sink his hands into the pudge along his hips, Shiro barely manages to muffle a gasp behind his hand. Even though Shiro’s interrupted, though, Keith still furrows his brow and frowns.

“I wish I’d had you there to watch that incident,” Keith tells whoever he’s thinking of right now. “Or to get your hands all over my body… Or both, y’know? Both is always good… You could’ve seen me trying to cram my ass into those jeans that were never gonna fit, and then made me late to work for a better reason than wardrobe malfunctions. Like, I can’t think of any better reason for being late than getting all this chub groped and appreciated, the way it deserves…”

Shiro’s cheeks flush so hot, he’s probably become a human fire-hazard. No doubt, he’s doing a convincing impersonation of a strawberry, and he could honestly burst into flame at any moment, he is _sure_. His lungs twist like there’s someone stabbing him and they’re trying to dodge the knife. But he keeps looking at Keith, in case Keith needs him and so he can’t miss out on what Keith does next. _Especially_ so he can’t miss out on whatever Keith does next.

“But that’s all behind us now,” Keith teases, almost too gently, even if he’s trying to play more coquettish at the moment. He smiles easily, but as he taps the side of his belly, that spark flares up behind his eyes again. “Only thing to do now is get these shorts done up.”

Turning to the center camera with a grin, Keith tells it, “Because I _can _still get these shorts done up. I _know_ I can.”

Determined to prove himself right, Keith sucks in his little belly again. Pale and self-insistent, it still protrudes through the zipper’s teeth, daring Keith to try and get them stitched together. With a sigh, he holds the puller in one hand. He clutches the denim in his other hand, pressing his knuckles into his chub. It helps, a little. The zipper moves up further than it did before—but that doesn’t leave Keith problem free. Every upward click that Keith manages to get makes his pudge shift upward, forcing him to go slowly and move his fingers up his curves, always on the heels of his slider. There’s no way that Keith is gonna make it all the way up, absolutely none. He has too much weight for that, by now.

Except, at long last, Keith gets his shorts done up all the way, exactly as he promised. The zipper seems to groan under the pressure of holding in all the chub that Keith’s put on around his middle. As Keith grins in triumph, his shorts practically creak, with the zipper visibly straining and the button quivering as it holds on for dear life. He puts his hands on his hips—under his sizable muffin-top, pushing in on his hips so that the pudgy rolls along his sides seem to stick out even further—and he poses so that his belly-fat seems to bulge more than it already did. Watching Keith try to bend over and get stuck because his shorts simply will not let him move, Shiro bites back on the chill the jolts down his spine.

There should be a reprieve when Keith turns to grab another top. When he twitches his hips and shakes his ass while getting the shirt on, Shiro keeps himself together. Keith makes his tummy wobble, giving Shiro and the center camera a nice profile view, and Shiro’s lungs continue protesting. They groan when he inhales, as if Keith’s body and his movements have the ability to literally make people stop breathing—but Shiro doesn’t let the pressure building inside his chest stop him. He keeps drawing breath. He doesn’t get lightheaded or allow any air to hitch inside his throat. Pursing his lips down at his own lap, Shiro lets himself believe that the worst of all presently possible torments might be over.

When he raises his eyes again, Keith’s wearing a cherry red crop-top with _Sweet Thing_ written on the chest in black glitter. It stretches on his softened chest, not as tight as his Dolly Parton t-shirt, but it doesn’t need to be. The point of his outfit is that the daisy dukes are stretched to their absolute limit while the crop-top exposes his whole muffin-top and some of the pudgiest parts of his stomach.

“Mmm, whatcha think of this,” Keith drawls, leaning into the tease side of his Akira character and pinching the rolls of fat along his sides. Good thing he doesn’t expect an answer, because Shiro’s mouth is Atacama Desert levels of dry. His voice has probably abandoned him besides, all from watching Keith jiggle his chub. “It takes some time to get into, sure? But I think I could wear it out of the house. Hell, I’d wear this outfit to church, if I ever went to church—but that’s not really what we’re waiting for right now, is it.”

Shiro guesses that it isn’t, but he’d have a better idea if he knew what Keith was talking about.

As soon as Keith draws in a deep breath, sucking in his stomach and probably pulling it as tight as he can right now, realization slams into Shiro like he’s been shoved face-first into a freezing lake. _Oh, God. Oh, no. Oh, Jesus—please, no… _But it doesn’t matter how much Shiro wishes to be wrong: Keith exhales harder than he needs to, letting his belly flop back into place. Letting out that breath, he allows his stomach to expand and makes the button quiver.

It doesn’t pop off, though. After he steals a glance of that stubborn thing, Keith rolls his eyes. Not one to be deterred from anything he’s set his mind to, Keith repeats the process. Inhaling, he pulls his stomach back as if he’s getting laced into an unseen corset. Exhaling, he lets his belly flop out and into place, tries to push his chub out as far as he can get it, arches his back so that his stomach will stick out even further and lets his waistband expand so far that, on two occasions, he cringes from the pain.

But after five rounds of this deep breathing, the button hasn’t moved.

Shiro would join him in that, if he could. If he ever got permission, he’d gladly jiggle Keith’s belly for him, too. But Keith slouches like he’s not enjoying it, this time—and although that makes his tummy bulge out further, it still doesn’t rob him of his button. He might be idly tapping at his chub not to tease his subscribers, but because having that softness around to play with soothes his nerves. If Shiro’s right about that, then Keith’s nerves are going through a meat grinder, at the moment.

Not that Shiro blames him, or that anybody could. After all the work that Keith’s put into getting these shorts on—after all that he’s done as a build-up to busting the button off these bottoms that probably haven’t fit in months—he’s found more resistance. More trouble with doing what he wants. More obstacles getting in the way of a clip that he thought would be fairly simple.

Keith doesn’t allow himself too much time to sulk about this, though. Pursing his lips, he straightens up again and tells the center camera, “Okay, we’re gonna try something else. I have a friend who sings—like, she got classically trained and took voice lessons all through her teenage years and college.” Keith puts his hands on his hips as if reassuring himself that he means business and that he has this in the back. ”So, she says there’s a way you breathe if you wanna sing better. Letting your diaphragm go looser or something instead of pulling it back like with chest-breathing, I think? You take in more air that way…”

Tracing one fingertip around his belly-button, Keith smirks. “_And _it means that you expand your stomach.”

Despite his best efforts, Shiro’s breath hitches in his throat. He’s heard Allura talk about this style of breathing before, but never in a context like this. The mere idea of what Keith’s proposing worms its way into his head and makes his lungs feel bogged down and cramped, as if there’s a nest of vipers curling their way around his insides. When he manages to draw in breath, his heart stutters to a stop from the shock of it all.

But it gets jump-started when Keith inhales deeply and says that he’s ready to try this out.

First, he lets his tummy flop back out to where it naturally falls. Then, he lets his shoulders droop, arches his back so that his chub pooches out and looks even bigger. Keith takes his next breath slowly, closes his eyes so he can focus on it—but he inhales so painfully slowly that his mind must be a storm of chaos. This kind of calm does not come naturally to Keith. Still, he doesn’t let anything distract him. Not the smells wafting off his desk. Not the way that his thighs chafe and jiggle when he shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Not the way that Shiro slips up and can’t help himself from gasping.

When Keith starts, the button’s already trembling, already threatening to burst off. As he draws in the oxygen, his belly expands instead of pulling tighter. His flesh bows outward, pressing against that hateful waistband. The button quivers even more as softness of Keith’s flesh threatens to disappear, going taut and firm with this temporary inflation. Looking at Keith—from only, simply looking at him—Shiro only barely manages to swallow a whimper that would no doubt break Keith’s focus. Part of him _wants_ to make that kind of noise, though, even knowing that he shouldn’t. Shiro covers his mouth again, just in case his throat gets ideas that he doesn’t want to make happen.

There shouldn’t be any room left over for Keith to breathe in. Patting the side of his rounding stomach, he allows himself a soft whine. That waistband was cutting into him so much before he started this. With his belly stretched out so much, the button-hole tries to escape from its task of keeping Keith contained. This isn’t going to work. Oh God, it isn’t. Keith’s scrunching up his face and he whines again as he rubs his tummy. He’s putting in so much effort, he’s in pain, but there’s no way that Keith can get this to—

_Rrrriiiiiiiiiiip! POP!_

Shiro’s hand muffles his gasp as the button finally comes off. It bursts off and clatters to the floor, and Keith exhales with a heavy sigh, grinning in triumph over managing this feat. Even though his belly seems to shrink as it goes loose again, it forces Keith’s zipper to slide back down. With that out of the way, Keith breathes more easily, takes a few deep rounds of it until he looks much more comfortable. Each inhale draws his stomach in, and with each exhale, his belly pushes the sides of his fly apart.

By the time Keith bends over to pick up the button, the sides of his fly have gotten shoved apart and crushed beneath his belly’s lower roll.

Holding the button up, Keith smirks and motions for Shiro to zoom in the center camera. He follows that direction without question, getting a good up-close shot of Keith holding the button between his fingers. When Keith nods that it’s okay, Shiro pulls the zoom back again, and Keith cocks one of his pudgy hips to the side.

“Did you guys like that,” he teases to the center camera, stroking his free hand up and down his beautiful, pudgy stomach. “I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling so much better about _everything_, now that I’m not being practically straitjacketed by those shorts… They really were good shorts while they lasted, though…” As he drums at some of his belly-pudge and makes it jiggle, Keith lets his smirk melt into another one of his faux-angelic smiles, as if he has no idea what he’s doing, even though he obviously does.

“I’m really gonna miss these things,” he says with a sigh, wiggling his hips as he peels himself out of the shorts.

Twitching around like that makes his belly wobble, which in turn, makes Shiro get that achingly tight feeling in his chest again. The feeling like his rib-cage has gotten too small for his lungs and left him unable to breathe. Things do not get better when Keith bends over again, letting his belly hang down but making sure that his audience can see enough of his porky thighs rubbing up against each other. After Keith gets the shorts low enough, he lets them drop down to the floor, steps out of them, kicks them aside.

The sight of him standing there in just a crop-top and his underwear, with his love-handles squashing the waistband of his boxer-briefs and the shirt’s bottom-hem drawing attention to exactly how pudgy Keith’s let his stomach get—God, Shiro swallows thickly, even though it makes no sense to get hung up on this. Watching Keith trace his fingers along the indent-marks that the shorts left on his belly, this shouldn’t make Shiro try to will himself out of getting hard. He’s been doing so well, keeping his arousal and his twisted desires locked up inside of him where they belong, keeping them from interrupting Keith’s shoot.

Shiro cannot mess this up for Keith, or for himself. He cannot let Keith figure out what kind of freaky things he’s into behind closed doors, or what kind of hypocrite those kinks likely make him. Come Hell, high water, Heaven, or having a meteor crash into his forehead, Shiro needs to _keep himself together_.

Aside from that, there’s no good reason for _this_ to be the view that makes Shiro pop the most inconvenient boner of his entire life so far. After everything else that Shiro’s seen Keith do today, he can’t be _that _surprised by seeing Keith next to naked. This is practically tame, compared to what else Keith’s done. Shiro closes his eyes for a moment, tries to focus on controlling himself and not messing up Keith’s clip.

When he opens them again, Keith’s smiling eagerly at the center camera and holding up an old pair of jeans. Out of everything in Keith’s wardrobe, Shiro has a special place in his heart for these jeans. Black, slim-fitting without exactly being skinny—before Shiro left, those pants hugged Keith perfectly. They didn’t struggle on body, but played up his best features without rubbing people’s faces in them. Tight without being indecent, clinging to him without looking like they could bust a seam at any minute. They were perfect for Keith, and Shiro lost count of how many times they ever made him feel like he was gonna faint.

As Keith holds the jeans up to his waist and models how much wider he’s gotten, Shiro can see the marks of strain that have settled in on the fabric. Spots along the legs that look a bit more gray than black, as if Keith exposed some vulnerable underbelly and left the pants with scars. Stripes where the waistband’s faded from being stretched so tight and crumpled over because Keith’s stomach and his love-handles were too, too much to be contained. The faded fabric and little balls puffed up along the inseam, up by the crotch, incontrovertible proof of how much Keith’s thighs have chafed against each other when he’s worn these pants out, lately.

Zooming in on that wear-and-tear, Shiro holds his breath. He swallows a sound and a feeling that he can’t decipher when he gets the shot lined up exactly right. Even looking at the middle camera’s screen and not the real thing is enough to set his head spinning like he might pass out at any minute.

It is, if anything, ten times worse when Keith manages to cram himself into the jeans. Sure, he’s quicker about this than he was with the shorts, and yes, he only needs to suck in his stomach to get the zipper up and the button done. But as if he isn’t doing anything potentially disruptive, Keith turns and poses—jiggling his tummy for the middle camera because he’s giving it a nice profile view; winking at the right-hand one as he bends over and letting it get a good, long look at how his stomach droops in front of him; throwing an over-the-shoulder kiss toward the one at Shiro’s left, then writhing so his love-handles and back-rolls look thicker, juicier, and so very, very squeezable—and Shiro chews on the inside of his cheek. He turns his mantra over and over in his head, thinking of all the reasons why he can look at Keith, but he cannot touch.

Giving in to temptation is out of the question. No two ways about that. Still, as Keith sucks in and starts buttoning his old, bright red Nice Shirt without taking off the crop-top, Shiro isn’t certain that eternal damnation can significantly deter him from reaching out and copping a feel, just one time. Keith can’t get the bottom button done, but leaving it open doesn’t help him with how tight that shirt has gotten. If not for the way the shirt wrinkles and bunches up around Keith’s stomach, Shiro would think that thing is painted on. Between the buttons, the fabric bows out, exposing strips of Keith’s pale skin, and as he settles on his mattress, it might be a miracle that he doesn’t split the seams or rip anything.

Spreading his legs so the center camera has a good view of his stomach, Keith waggles his eyebrows. He tosses his bangs back off his forehead. He smirks like the Devil himself and purrs, “Strap in good, okay. Here’s where things get _really_ fun.”

Which is Shiro’s cue. He waves his hand over the items on Keith’s desk, waits for him to nod that he wants the pizza. Dutiful as ever—or anyway, that’s what he _tries _to be—Shiro hands over the box and several of the napkins. The lamplight glistens on the first huge, pepperoni and sausage and onion-encrusted, pineapple-free, extra-cheesy slice that Keith pulls out, enough to make Shiro wonder if he gave Keith _enough_ napkins. Then again, grease stains probably don’t matter when Keith won’t be able to wear that shirt after tonight.

Nothing really matters when Keith takes his first bite, either. The rest of the world could burst into flames and Shiro wouldn’t notice a thing. Not when Keith moans so deeply, ripping off a decently-sized chunk. Large enough that he gives himself a case of chipmunk cheeks while chewing. Dropping one hand to his belly, he takes one more bite, and then another. Tapping his chub and making it jiggle, he throws a long-lashed set of bedroom eyes toward the center camera. He tells it how this tastes _so good_, he can’t wait to get all of it down inside him…

And then, he looks at Shiro.

No mistaking it, either. As Keith shoves the rest of the slice into his mouth—as he licks the grease off of his fingers—he definitely looks right at Shiro. He’s whining in pleasure as before, but it doesn’t completely hit his eyes. Sure, he still mostly looks like he wants to get pounded into the mattress as soon as he’s done stuffing himself, but there’s an impatient edge that feels a bit at-odds with the way that he’s tried to play this clip, so far, and—

…Right. Talking is hard to do while eating, and Shiro’s meant to keep Keith from getting bored.

He’s supposed to talk instead, because he isn’t hooked up to a mic and it’ll be easy enough to edit out any audio from him. The field’s wide open on discussion topics, too. Anything is fair game today, as long as Shiro keeps Keith entertained so he can keep on eating.

Tucking his white fringe back behind his ear, Shiro starts with the first thing that he can think of: “I really did like California?”

Keith doesn’t nod because he can’t right now. But he arches his eyebrows as he groans and shoves about half of his second slice into his mouth. Eating quickly makes perfect sense. Keith can’t be completely mindless about it, not while shooting a clip, but he also can’t wait too long between bites or his body will start to protest sooner.

“Well, I liked California, which…” Shiro shrugs. “I mean, going out there as big as I was? Totally expected to hate it. To hate everything but the classes at USC, I mean. Because being a fat guy in California, and especially Los Angeles, is… It’s just not the thing to be, y’know?”

Again, Keith answers him by tearing into the pizza and giving up an indecent, teasing noise. If he were not currently preoccupied, he might be saying something about how he gets it and he hates that LA is so claustrophobically body-conscious, or snapping about how Shiro didn’t need to change himself for anybody in Hollywood because fuck them and their beauty standards, that’s why.

As it stands, Shiro leans his head back so he won’t have to watch Keith rubbing his stomach and starting on slice number three. The breathy little noise Keith makes twists Shiro’s insides up in Gordian knots of _please-kill-me-oh-god-want_. He can only imagine how bad that would be if he had the visuals. No, no looking at Keith right now. Talking to the ceiling is so much easier.

“One thing I wasn’t so hot on, though,” he says, shaking his bangs loose so he can comb his fingers through them. “California guys are, like? They aren’t _bad_ or anything? I wouldn’t write a gay, Beach Boys cover song called ‘California Boys’ but they aren’t _horrible_ or anything. It’s just that… They’re like…” _They aren’t you. None of them could even hold a candle to you. _“Y’know, for as image-obsessed as LA is supposed to be? I didn’t actually get hit on more once I started slimming down—”

Keith moans again, loud enough to shut Shiro up.

How he manages to make moaning sound incredulous, Shiro has no idea. But his cheeks flush pink and he drums his fingertips on the desk, trying to think of how best to answer that. Trying not to let Keith’s doubt get to him when he’s found a semi-decent conversational groove.

“I’m _serious_,” Shiro sighs as Keith sighs contentedly around a bite that Shiro hopes is as good for him as he makes it sound. “Not that there was a lot of time for going out, but Lotor has his, ‘I wanna be where the people are’ thing. And there were gay bars and clubs that would let us in. We were sorta limited to their chubby nights at first, because of me, which was awkward?”

Keith inhales sharply, then follows it with a low, quivering groan. A brief pause, and then another whining, breathy little noise.

But Shiro resolutely keeps looking at the ceiling. “Not awkward for _Lotor_, obviously. Y’know, he’s over here wearing mesh shirts and leather pants. Hitting on all the big guys without falling all over himself. Going in hardest on the ones who looked the most like Hunk because he knows that I won’t call him out on it until _after_ he gets laid—”

Keith snorts before letting slip a sound like he might be wincing. Shiro probably shouldn’t smirk about making him edge toward breaking character. Except it’s nice, hearing that. It’s almost like things are getting back to normal between them. Almost like Shiro could joke about Lotor hacking up yellow irises for the tenth time around last year’s Valentine’s Day, then pouting and going to Shiro with something that was only a stunning revelation to Lotor himself: _“Darling, I think that I might have genuine romantic feelings for Hunk.”_

Except he can’t. Not right now, at any rate. Not when they’re getting _so close_ to finishing this clip already.

Swishing out his ponytail, Shiro presses onward and says, “But chubby nights were awkward for _me_ because it’s pretty much Freak Show Night.” When he hears a scoffing noise from around the bed, Shiro rolls his eyes as though the ceiling has exasperated him. “Going out as a big guy, _especially _in LA? There’s no way to tell if you’re being hit on in earnest, or if he wants to sleep with you but not be seen in public with you, or…” His shoulders quirk of their own accord. “It was like when Maurice took me to that Super Weekend thing in Kansas? Like, ‘Oh, that guy probably meant to catcall Lotor, except apparently he didn’t. Oh, _this_ guy is probably being non-sexually nice to me, except Lotor swans over while I’m getting a refill and he’s all like…’”

Shiro clears his throat. Eyes closed, he lifts his head and flips his hair. Sufficiently in character, he drawls in an affectionately affected caricature of Lotor’s posh accent, “‘Darling, _please_ make up your mind on whether or not you’re interested in that big, tall glass of heavy cream who’s been flirting with you all night. If you don’t, then I _swear_ by all the gods in every pantheon _and_ by the Altean ancients, Takashi. If you do not act, then I will scoop him up and hopefully have my world rocked in ways that could only be rivaled by you, and Hunk, and Chris Pratt before Marvel made him get those _hateful_ abdominals.’”

First, a sound like Keith trying to stifle himself so he won’t full-on laugh. Even knowing how much work they’d undo if they messed up the clip now, Shiro can’t help letting himself smirk at that. He looks down at the floor, in the hopes of not distracting Keith too terribly. But a flush of pride washes over him regardless, along with that warm, inexplicably _pink_ feeling that Keith’s been giving him for years. Whatever else has changed or stayed the same between them, Shiro can still make Keith laugh.

And then Keith starts coughing.

Shiro clenches his fingers around the edge of the desk to keep himself in line. Keep himself from lousing up literally everything. Sometimes, things go funny during shoots. Sometimes, unexpected coughing happens. It’s easy enough to cut that out when he’s editing later, but it’d be so much more difficult to work around Shiro running into the shot because he let his imagination drag him all over hither and yon, and started panicking over nothing. He can do this. He can keep his wits about him and keep hands to himself and _keep it all together_.

The coughs don’t stop after a couple rounds, though. They’re deep, and hard, like maybe Keith’s blossoming for somebody yet again. Or maybe like he’s choking. And they never stop, they just keep coming. _Oh God, no_—

Shiro looks up in a flash. Heart pounding, he looks around the mattress—all over the messy sheets and up to the headboard—and he doesn’t see Keith. Throat closing around itself, Shiro glances at the door and then the window. His eyes dart all over Keith’s room, keep coming up with nothing. But Keith was _right here_, Shiro _heard_ him, where would he be if not here—

A snapping sound smacks Shiro on the back of the head. Something hits the hardwood floor with a _click-click-click-click-click_. So many ticks that Shiro can’t count them all. As it dies down, he blinks at Keith’s wall, but a tight, whining grunt jerks his eyes back to the bed.

There’s Keith, exactly where he was supposed to be. He isn’t coughing anymore, just blinking innocently at Shiro with one hand patting his stomach and the other shoving another slice of pizza past his lips. Shiro’s cheeks warm because _Jesus_, how could he get so lost in his own head that he didn’t notice Keith when Keith hasn’t moved at all.

They heat up more thinking that Keith won’t have room for dinner if he really keeps going like this, but then again, that might not be a _bad_ thing. Watching Keith stuff himself right now is good in its own right, but watching him do it out in public? At whatever restaurant Hunk and Lotor have decided on for tonight’s little get-together? With the waiter asking where Keith puts away everything he ordered? With other patrons looking on from their own booths and tables, eyes going wide as they watch Keith order more appetizers or a second entree? Hearing him whine as he fills his belly up so much that it starts to hurt… So much that it bursts out of his clothes where everyone can see it, sticks out so far ahead of him that there’s no hope of hiding it from anyone on the walk back to the car, assuming that Keith doesn’t need to just be carried—

Shiro bites on the inside of his lip by way of banishing those thoughts. God, why can’t he keep it together?

Dropping his eyes to the comforter, he doesn’t find a pile of flower petals. Alright, no Hanahaki messes to clean up. But as he tries to look Keith in the eye, Shiro snags around his midsection instead. Dumbfounded, he blinks at a wider swath of pale skin right around the fullest part of Keith’s tummy. Wrinkles his nose at a spot that used to have a button because for a moment, it makes no sense whatsoever. He can’t be seeing that, not the absence and not the hole. It can’t be real, none of it.

Except Keith winces as he kneads the pudge that he’s exposed. With a sigh and a sheepish smile, he presses his fingertips into a place that looks particularly plump, showing the influence of how much pizza he’s eaten. Shiro’s face feels like it’s catching fire, just looking at Keith. Everything makes heat coil and twist and slither around the pit of Shiro’s stomach, from the buttons straining on Keith’s shirt to the way he shoves the rest of his slice into his mouth. From the way his belly bounces when he slaps it, to the way he groans as he licks the grease off of his pizza-eating hand.

As Keith wipes that hand on a napkin, he knocks his foot against the bed-frame. Nodding, Shiro waves a hand over the desk, then hands Keith a fork and the container of Pad See-Iew. With how much spice he likes, he’ll want some milk to go with this. Darting to the kitchen, Shiro says nothing about how Keith’s digging right into his takeout when he’s already eaten more than half the pizza. When he comes back with the quart that isn’t already open, he tries not to assess how much of a dent Keith’s put into his takeaway. He tries to look anywhere but at Keith’s pile of meat and noodles.

On one hand, Keith makes that easy, lighting up with a megawatt grin as he sets his food aside.

On the other, though, he throws himself into chugging a long, deep drink. He sucks in his belly as he all but inhales the milk, then comes up with a sigh and lets his paunch flop back out again. Several buttons quiver, and this time, two of them pop off, clattering to the floor.

A bright pink blush rises to Keith’s cheeks as he looks up at the center camera. His face screams that he got caught with both hands in the cookie jar, all pursed lips and wide eyes that fail to look any kind of innocent. His actions tell a different story, though. Blush or no blush, Keith sets the Pad See-Iew down behind him and a few inches away. He shuffles around his mattress, spreading his legs even wider and letting all his paunch hang out. He ghosts his fingers down the distended, swollen curve of his poor midsection, tapping every so often. Even as stuffed as he’s getting, Keith manages to send ripples through some of his soft flesh.

Keith’s a vision like this, cutting a sight that Shiro’s dreamt about but never thought he’d see in real life. Everything south of his chest has come wide open—except for his jeans, stubbornly clinging to some semblance of structural integrity. What hint of crop-top Shiro can make out is all bunched up, as if it’s protesting being asked to fit on Keith at all. Rounding out more than it already had, his belly the sides of the shirt so far apart, Shiro can’t fathom how Keith got it buttoned, even though he was standing right here to watch Keith do it.

Massaging at a spot that looks particularly full and tight, Keith groans. He pushes his fingertips into his flesh, making himself whine. A soft belch gets him to blush again, and another full-palm smack at his belly makes a louder belch come up. He winces, grunts, keeps rubbing and working his own stomach over, trying to ease some of the pressure that has got to be building up inside of him by now. Then, his squirming has a discomforted stiffness that Shiro really, _really_ hopes doesn’t mean what he thinks it does. The low, throaty moan that Keith gives up next says that he’s probably wrong; Keith has likely gotten hard.

Not that Shiro can blame him for that, really. He’s digging his backside against Keith’s desk, but nothing’s helping to dissuade his cock. Grinding the edge of the table into his palm doesn’t stop the twist of heat and _need_ and _fuck_ and _want_ that jolts through his stomach, doesn’t stop the twitch as his cock finally gives up and gets hard. Dimly, Shiro wishes he could be a beached baby whale again, for just a couple minutes. That way, he could hide an erection in his flabby underbelly, use his fat to keep Keith from figuring out what’s going on, then get himself off in the bathroom and make absolutely nothing awkward. Thank God these pajama bottoms are loose on him, or else Shiro would officially be _screwed_.

Watching Keith reach for the Pad See-Iew again, Shiro has no idea how he keeps his breathing even. Even looking at the floor doesn’t help him, not when Keith moans around his fork as if somebody has their mouth around his shaft. His throat feels as tight as Keith’s stomach looks. His lungs writhe and spasm like he has a thousand electric eels shocking their way around inside him. The only reason Shiro knows that he’s still breathing is that he hasn’t yet passed out.

Right as he’s feeling more stable, though, Keith clears his throat. Shiro looks up and hopes that his face remains a few shades lighter than Keith’s shirt. God, _please_, don’t let him be blushing quite that much. Especially not when Keith forms a huge clump of noodles past his lips and pointedly quirks both eyebrows.

……Oh yeah, talking. Keeping Keith entertained. There’s a job and Shiro isn’t doing it. He stifles a sigh but still allows himself to shake his head. It doesn’t rattle any screws loose or put any of his mental wires back where they belong. But taking that moment lets Shiro breathe a bit more easily. Helps give him back a grasp on his words, like they aren’t so nebulous as they feel.

“I mean, it’s like I was saying?” He hugs himself now, as if this might prevent Keith from overly scrutinizing how this shirt fits on his abs. Not that Keith is doing that for real, but Shiro can’t tell, which means Keith _could_ be. “I hated being fat, but at least I still got hit on, back then. I swear, the only person who’s flirted with me since I got back into the two-hundreds was this guy we worked with at the studio…”

Even thinking about Alexander makes Shiro cringe. He tightens his hold on himself, remembering everything that Alexander told him on their date, which Shiro would prefer not to think about for the rest of his life, if possible. _I knew that you’d be sexy if you lost the weight, but I didn’t know you had this kind of hotness in you… But seriously, it must be so much better for you, getting liberated from all of that… You must’ve lost about two-hundred-fifty pounds by now, and holy shit, it shows… You’re so gorgeous now, I’d be embarrassed to be seen with you—but because nobody would think I’m hot enough to be with you, and not the other way around._

Although he successfully bites back a shudder, Shiro could swear that he sees Keith smirk over hearing him disavow Alexander. Not just any smirk, either. Keith’s lips curl up into the expression that he wears whenever he’s right about something while someone else is wrong, or when he beats Lance at a round of _Mario Kart_. But a sense of victory doesn’t fit with this situation, does it? There’s nothing for Keith to gloat about. He hasn’t won anything just because Shiro had such a massive lapse in judgment about a guy who seemed interested in him.

Whatever, though. Shiro shrugs and tells Keith, “He was a total jerk, which I honestly should’ve seen coming. I thought that he might not be? Like, maybe he just had a squiffy first impression. And then maybe he was only cold to me for most of our internship because he was socially awkward or going through some stuff that I didn’t know about and shouldn’t judge him for…” Shiro swallows thickly, gripping onto his elbow as if this can fight back the anger bubbling in his chest. “Yeah no, I was wrong about him.”

The box-spring creaks, and when Shiro looks at Keith again, he’s shuffling around, trying to smirk at the center camera as though it might cover up the way he’s wincing. There’s no way that he can be comfortable, with his legs opened up so far. Yet, Keith grins as he throws back another sip of milk, so what does Shiro know. Nothing, apparently. He has no idea how Keith feels or how comfortable he is or isn’t.

“I don’t know,” Shiro says before he can think of stopping himself. “Maybe I should’ve seen Lance’s reaction to how I look now coming, too? I mean, it’s a lot of difference to take in all at once. He's right about that. But then, I seriously haven’t gotten hit on since losing weight. And it’s completely counter-intuitive, and not what you’d expect—or anyway, it’s not what I expected to happen—but…”

Shiro quirks his shoulders. “At least I’m not, y’know… I don’t feel like I’m so…” He trails off and tightens his hold on himself. God, he can’t tell Keith what’s really on his mind, right now. Aside from how Keith got a major change dropped on him this morning—aside from how he’s probably some kind of mad about it, no matter how things have gone between them so far—Shiro would end up distracting him in truly unhelpful ways if he admitted to how he’s really feeling. To how he’s felt for longer than he can remember.

“I feel better about myself like this,” he says instead of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God. It’s not an outright lie; it’s just a tailored, somewhat redacted version of reality. “I’m happier with my body and my life, now. So, that should be what matters. Not whether or not I get hit on by guys I’m usually not even interested in.”

Especially not now that Shiro’s home, with the guy who has always been his number one. Casual sex in California was fine, when Shiro could still get any, and he doubts that Keith has spent the past eighteen months completely celibate. But now, Shiro’s back where he belongs, holding onto himself for dear life as he watches Keith sucking on his fork, then chewing on a huge, tangled mess of noodles and a cube of tofu. His insides tie themselves up not over someone in a bar who might have or might have not been flirting with him, but over watching the way that Keith can eat.

He’s blushing scarlet and choking on a case of dry-mouth not thanks to some stranger who might’ve only wanted to fuck a fat guy but didn’t really see Shiro as a person otherwise, but over Keith—_his_ Keith, his best friend practically since they first met each other, his beloved above all other loves, the guiding star of Shiro’s entire pathetic life. He bites on the inside of his lip when Keith stares at him again. But it’s the sound of scraping styrofoam that makes Shiro notice how he’s fallen silent all over again. Keith puts it aside and nods for Shiro to hand him the box of cupcakes instead, and Shiro ducks his chin as though this might keep Keith from noticing the way his cheeks are heating up.

“Sorry, baby, I’m… I guess I’m sorta running out of things to talk about…” Giving up isn’t one of Shiro’s habits, though. So, he shakes his head, and worries his fingers through his white fringe, and takes a deep breath to sustain himself. “You really do look good, though? I’m sorry if I didn’t… Or if I made you feel like anything about this wasn’t okay, or like I don’t… Or if I made you feel like you were, I don’t know…”

As he twists his bangs around his finger, Shiro tries not to let himself read into the way Keith blushes. He’s partway through an enormous bite of cupcake, paused with his lips buried in the frosting. His eyes go as wide and round as his stomach’s getting, which makes Shiro’s heart bang against his rib-cage as if it means to break out and streak naked down the block. His stomach lurches, and shifting against the desk—pressing harder into it in the hopes of keeping himself better grounded and on his best behavior—doesn’t make Shiro stop thinking about what it could mean that Keith looks so startled.

But God, Keith’s blush is the worst thing about all of this. His cheeks go so pink that Shiro wants to reach over and brush Keith’s hair off his face. His bangs are getting in the way of Shiro’s view. If he got close enough for that, they’d be getting in the way of Shiro’s ability to kiss Keith, too. He swallows thickly, bites back a proposition that he almost makes because—

No, no, oh God, _no_. Shiro cannot allow himself to say anything about kissing Keith. Not while Keith is working, and not without knowing that he’s really interested. He has to shake himself around and make this work, get back to making things _easier_ for Keith, the way he promised that he would—

“I mean it, Keith,” he says quietly, as Keith manages to choke down the bite of cupcake. As he licks the frosting and strawberry filling off his mouth, Shiro stares down at his belly instead. It’s teasing him, but it’s less difficult to look at than Keith’s mouth. “I know that I probably didn’t react in an _encouraging_ way? And you were right, I’ve really got no leg to stand on about that—I dropped an even bigger change on you than you did me, I mean? Your belly is just… It’s like… Uh, _wow_, y’know?”

Keith lets the empty wrapper drop onto his comforter. Breathing deeply, he rubs at his tummy with one hand and grabs up another cupcake with the other. A quick glance up says that he’s got his blush more or less under control, and he nods as he chomps on his new conquest. Whether or not this discussion is helping Keith, he wants Shiro to keep talking.

“You’re _gorgeous_ like this, okay? I never even—not that you were anything _but_ gorgeous before? You completely were, but it’s like… With this extra weight you’ve gained while I was away, and the way your stomach’s getting—”

Cutting himself off, Shiro muffles a cough with the back of his hand. It’s pathetic, listening to himself babble. His lungs writhe and his throat threatens to close up on itself, just to keep him from saying anything else. Too much more and Keith could figure out that Shiro has a fetish, that he looks at porn only Lotor would admit to watching.

His heart leaps into his throat as he looks at Keith, though. He takes the rest of the cupcake’s top off in one bite, then pouts at Shiro. Swallowing makes him wince and wriggling doesn’t seem to help him find a more comfortable position. Down toward his lap, the button on his jeans clings on with tenacity that Shiro begrudgingly admires. Yeah, the sight of it makes him feel like he has thorns scraping along the back of his throat and the insides of his lungs. But that button has a lot of nerve to keep hanging on like this. It has almost as much nerve as Keith does, rubbing gently at his stomach as he eats the rest of the cupcake right out of the wrapper.

God, Keith must be getting so uncomfortable… If Shiro can offer him any kind of relief, then he has to do it, right? Hang the consequences.

“I mean, anyone who says that you aren’t beautiful is out of their freaking mind, baby,” Shiro says, clenching his hand around his elbow so he won’t get hung up on anything as Keith starts eating cupcake number three. “Look at how chubby you’re getting… I wouldn’t call you _fat_ yet, but you’ll get there soon enough, I’d bet—if you want to, I mean? And it’s okay, if you don’t…”

Of course, a risk’s involved, but Shiro looks to Keith rather than keep talking. He needs that eager little nod, a confirmation that he isn’t saying anything to hurt Keith’s feelings. No matter what kinky media he looks at in the dead of night, Shiro can’t get rid of his history as a _really big_ guy—as the former fattest member of The Gang by far, with Hunk in a distant second-place—and even knowing that people do get off on hearing things like this, he _needs_ to be sure that he’s doing right by Keith. His brow knots up and his lips go tight in concern. His entire body feels like it’s vibrating, shivering with nervous energy as he watches Keith scarf down the cupcake and waits for him to let Shiro know.

As Keith picks up his fourth treat, he rolls his eyes. Arches a brow impatiently. Gives Shiro a look as if he’s saying, _“_**_Really_**_, Shiro? I mean, really?”_

Shiro holds up his hands in mock-surrender. “Just checking in before I go in too hard, okay?”

That makes Keith soften—makes him sigh instead of moaning around his current mouthful of cupcake—and he slouches as he looks at Shiro. His eyes get dewy without quite misting over. He pouts again, but instead of impatient, he looks like he’s trying to check in with Shiro. But Shiro nods, forces down the impulse to yank Keith up and kiss him to within an inch of his life, to press that belly against his abs and sink his fingers into Keith’s love-handles, to taste the mix of sweet and grease and spice that he’ll have rollicking around his mouth by now and feel the way Keith moves against him now—

“God, you’ve gotten so round,” Shiro breathes out before he can get too lost in a tangled mess of unfulfilled desires. “Your belly, sure, but your backside’s gotten pretty luscious, too… I didn’t think it was possible for you to have a better ass than you did before I left, but…” He lets out a low whistle, trying not to sound too much like the guys who’ve ever catcalled people around him. He wants to seem impressed, not like he only sees Keith as a piece of meat. “Seriously, Keith… The way you’ve been making yourself jiggle today? The way your thighs rub against each other? Your belly—_Jesus_, it was _so cute_ when you were bending over earlier? All drooping and pooched out like that, I can’t even…”

Keith inhales sharply. The fourth wrapper joins the pile that he’s building up. But rather than reach for a new one right away, he splays both hands out along his belly. He’s careful while he jostles his paunch, while pushing his palms into one of his stomach’s fullest-looking parts—but he winces like that was probably not the best idea. Keith takes a moment, once he lets that position go. Deep breath in, then a slow exhale. Deep breath in and he sucks his stomach in as much as he can get (which isn’t much and his expression contorts in pain again, but Keith’s trying). Then, a slow exhale as he lets his belly surge back out in its full glory.

Relentless as ever, that button hangs on. As Keith rubs his curves, he lets out another belch. It doesn’t make him look any more comfortable. He’s going to outlast the button, though, because Keith is bulldog levels of stubborn. He doesn’t ever call it quits when he truly sets his mind to doing something. Gritting his teeth, he picks up another cupcake and digs into it.

“You’re doing so well, baby,” Shiro tells him gently. “You didn’t get this chubby without an ample appetite… You’ve gotta keep going if you want to get even bigger, and you _do _want that, right? You’re not satisfied with only being chubby… You’ll never be satisfied until you’ve gotten fat, but you can’t get fat if you give up…”

Saying that, Shiro has to grind against the desk. Has to drag himself back down to reality, at least a little bit. Daydreams about how big Keith could get in the future, what he might look like at two-hundred-and-fifty pounds, how wide his hips and stomach would get if he got up to three-hundred, how his thighs would jiggle so much more and cellulite could start dimpling has ass, how it’d feel to get underneath him and to let Keith squash him with that flab and every single extra pound… God, those ideas plaguing Shiro help absolutely no one.

For good measure, Shiro gives himself another round of squirming. Digs harder against the edge so that he’ll learn his freaking lesson and keep his garbage brain in check. Keith isn’t putting on this show for him, and he doesn’t need to be bothered with anything that Shiro’s into. As Keith starts shoveling down the sixth cupcake—as he whines, shifting on the bed and finding no half-decent, semi-comfortable position—Shiro’s job here is to _focus._

“Yeah, I _bet_ you’re getting full,” he says, voice low without really being quiet. Drumming his fingers along his arm, he takes a deep breath. Unsure of where to go, he takes another—and then his mouth takes over for him, as if he’s been possessed: “Or should I say: you _think_ you’re getting full. Maybe you even want to _believe_ that you’re getting full. But on some level, Keith? I think we both know better. Your stomach might be protesting, but there’s no way that you’re _anywhere_ near finished eating—”

Keith moans, taking the rest of his cupcake into his mouth. It’s probably from how good Hunk’s baking is—but Jesus, Keith looks right at Shiro. He throws his head back, with his distended belly quivering and whole body trembling. If Shiro didn’t know better, he’d believe that Keith just came inside his jeans before he’s even busted out of them. When he comes back up, panting as though he has actually gotten fucked, Keith looks at Shiro with a pleading glimmer in his eyes. Unwrapping cupcake number seven, he nods like he desperately wants Shiro to keep going.

“Do you think you’re fooling anybody, thinking that you’re stuffed too much to eat? Look at yourself, baby…”

A chill courses down Shiro’s spine as he dredges all this garbage up. Pulls on so many things he’s told himself before. But as he keeps his eyes on Keith, heat twists around his lungs, intent on strangling him from the inside out. Thank God for Keith. Thank God for how his belly’s gotten so stuffed that it billows out into his lap. Thank God for the way he groans as he kneads at the side of his stomach, and the way he sighs around the cupcake, and the way the frosting on his lips makes him look like he’s hungry for a kiss as much as for the food—

“You don’t fool me, Keith. Not for a second.” Shiro swallows thickly. The chills and the heat clash inside him, like he’s sitting on a storm. But he can’t stop now. Not when they’ve come so far. Not when Keith _needs _him to do this so they can finish the clip. It’s not much for Shiro to cling to, but Keith _needs_ him—“I know you and I know your body. You wouldn’t have _ever_ gotten so chunky if you’d kept your sense of self-control. But you let it go. Oh, you let it all go. A belly like that doesn’t come out of nowhere, right. You’ve grown it yourself, given up all your former tone and let that plump, jiggling tummy blossom instead.”

He closes his eyes. Breathes in deep and focuses. “You could’ve stopped yourself from getting fat like this at any moment, baby. You know exactly what you could’ve done. Resisted all of that temptation. Put more effort into maintaining your physique. You’d probably get winded going up one single flight of stairs anymore, and you’ve got nobody else to blame for that. You know it’s only your fault that you let yourself get so big and lazy…”

Shiro’s voice quivers as badly as Keith’s body was doing. He knows these words from somewhere. He can’t put his finger on _where_, exactly. But wherever he’s pulling these things from, something deep in his chest writhes, all sick and guilty, over saying them to Keith. Even with Keith’s ostensible permission—even knowing that he isn’t alone in reacting like this—saying this stuff to him feels _off_. How could Keith _enjoy_ this? How could anyone like being sneered at? Having their body put under a microscope and verbally ripped to shreds—how does that get _anybody_ off?

In all likelihood, there are answers to those questions. More answers than Shiro’s ever been able to find or comprehend. It doesn’t matter, though. Watching Keith rubbing at his belly, Shiro loses sight of anything and everything outside this room.

Keith’s stomach is flushing redder than his cheeks, right now. He groans as he massages at the tight swell of it, as he kneads at his own flesh. His breath comes to him in shorter bursts and gasps, no matter what he tries to keep it controlled. Keep it even. Keep himself from getting worked up in a way that he won’t enjoy. And it makes Shiro’s heart spasm like it wants to give up on beating like it should, watching Keith from the sidelines. The way that Keith’s voice leaps up a few notes… The way his face contorts with pain, teeth gritting and expression all up tying itself into knots… They seem like they’ll never come undone, until they do, but then Keith barely gets a moment to relax before an even worse pain shocks through him and carves out deeper lines on his face… He whines as though he might be sick—

Shiro lurches off the desk. Before he knows what his body’s doing, he drops to the floor. To his knees, right between Keith’s legs. His hands jump up to Keith’s belly and he gasps, pressing his palm into Keith’s flesh. Because Keith’s body is so warm, and even stuffed to the brim like this—even with his gut only slightly softer than a rock—there’s still some give to his frame. Still so many places where Shiro could lose his fingers in Keith’s soft flesh, and God help him? As he squishes a particularly cramped spot at the thickest part of Keith’s middle—as Keith gasps, groans, whimpers that _oh, God, that’s so good, please, _**_please_**_, yes_—all that Shiro wants for himself is to get lost in Keith. In every inch and every pound and every place where his lean, taut muscle has gone soft and bloomed into this lush, jiggling pudge.

Not that Shiro wants to die, but if he had to go out right now? Suffocating between Keith’s chunky thighs would be ideal.

For all Keith’s belly isn’t currently soft to the touch, there’s more than enough for Shiro to get lost in. As he coaxes another bone-deep moan out of Keith, his cock throbs. His heart and stomach jerk as if they can’t stand it anymore, as if being stuck inside of Shiro is literally killing them and they need to make an escape. They don’t manage it, but still, it takes herculean effort to choke back all the sounds that threaten to crawl out of his throat. This isn’t about him; it’s about Keith. He pushed himself to the brink, and if Shiro doesn’t help ease the pressure, he’ll be sick.

With one hand clinging to his sheets, Keith lets his head loll back. He tries to spit out _something_, but words don’t happen. His half-baked, spluttering syllables say he’s probably beyond them, at this point, but that’s okay. As long as he gets the help he needs, then he doesn’t need to say anything for Shiro. It’s enough to have him whining and squirming, arching his back so his belly pushes out to meet Shiro’s hands, gasping and moaning and letting his mouth go slack when Shiro finds a spot that Keith wasn’t able to rub out on his own or when he works Keith’s gut over particularly well… It’s enough to know that Keith likes this, to know that Shiro can do anything for him, even if it isn’t much and really, Keith probably could have managed fine on his own…

Slowly but surely, though, Keith’s noises sound less pained, more pleasured as Shiro keeps this up. He wriggles less and pushes into Shiro’s hands more because he seems to want it. God, Shiro wishes that were true. As he feels his pulse in his cock, he swallows a gasp. Chokes back on feeling like he wants anything. Focuses on Keith, on his swollen belly, on his breathy moans and the way he whines and manages to whimper an, _“Oh, God, please…”_

On his eyes, darkened with something that Shiro can’t decipher and intently blinking down at him. On catching Keith’s eyes and holding his gaze, no matter how much Shiro’s cheeks burn like a forest fire, no matter how red he must be getting. He tunes out the impulses that want him to grab the telltale bulge in Keith’s shorts—Shiro chews the inside of his lip whenever Keith’s stomach bobs against his crotch, he clenches his jaw when those full-bodied whining sounds claw their way out of Keith’s throat, and he tries to ignore the damp stain that’s spreading along the fabric—and he zeroes in on Keith’s face, all flushed and slack-jawed and _oh so wanting_.

Keeping his hands at work, pressing them into the sides of Keith’s stomach and rubbing as if their lives depend on this, Shiro leans in as close as he can get. He nudges his nose against Keith’s belly-button, then butts his forehead against the spot where Keith’s tummy curves out furthest. Keith groans and it’s a gorgeous sound. But the heady, salty smell around his skin makes Shiro’s cock ache in protest that much more. As he nuzzles as Keith’s middle—at the person in his entire sorry life whom he treasures above all others, himself included—Shiro keeps his breaths deep and even. Almost lets himself relax into the warmth washing over most of him. Goes on like this until his cock all but screaming at him to forget this scene and run for the shower and get himself off where Keith can’t see him do it because who even cares.

Guilt kicks him in the ribs for that. Doesn’t manage to quench his lust, but it makes Shiro look Keith in the eye again. He says nothing, can’t think of what to say or how. But as he kneads on one side of Keith’s gut and caresses a roll of chub along the other, Shiro lets his eyes mist over. Silently, he pleads, _“Baby, please… Baby, I’m so sorry for what I didn’t tell you… I’m sorry that I didn’t trust you because you deserve so much better than that, especially from me… I’m sorry that I love you, sorry that I fell for you at all, sorry that I’ve never just moved on when you can’t want anything with me because why would you… But please, Baby, please let me stay…”_

Pouting, Keith worries a hand through Shiro’s hair. Pushes his black bangs off his face and opens his mouth like he’s got something to say—

Anything dies when Shiro kisses Keith’s belly. Grazes his lips over a spot that he’s softened up a little. Pressing his mouth into Keith’s flesh makes him gasp so hard that he nearly sucks in his gut. Nipping at his skin makes him wiggle his hips. His back arches, shoves his stomach into Shiro’s face like Keith’s got half a mind to smother him—but Keith’s head throws itself back as he groans, so he might not be doing this intentionally.

Whatever the truth is, Shiro doesn’t care. He keeps kissing that spot, sucking on Keith’s tummy and biting and lapping up the warmth of his skin. He’s gonna leave Keith with a hickey, come tomorrow, and that thought is _good_, oh so very _good_—but nowhere near as pressing as Keith’s hands trembling. Both of them. In the bed-sheets and in Shiro’s hair. Images of what might happen get drowned out by the sight of Keith’s Adam’s apple—still visible because his neck hasn’t thickened up that much yet—quivering and bobbing and straining harder against his skin than his buttons did before he popped them off.

Every breath he takes between his rounds of gasping and moaning? It sounds labored, like he’s forcing himself to make them achingly slow. Like he’s trying to hold out on himself, even as Shiro follows the cues he drops. But Keith’s knuckles are white, down on the bed. He tugs on Shiro’s hair with a death-grip that hurts so good. When Keith’s stomach knocks into his face again, Shiro throws himself into another kiss. Catches some of Keith’s soft flesh with his mouth, sucking on the pudge and biting it with intent, but also like he’s going at the most important task he’s ever faced, like he’s kissing the most precious person in the universe because he _is_—

Keith gasps at another nibble, but there’s something different about it.

Maybe it gets him deeper. Maybe it’s sharper on the inhale. Maybe it’s something to do with how he whines as the gasp shocks through him. Or maybe Shiro’s reading too much into things, and he needs to just keep kissing until Keith tells him to let up already—

Then, Keith shudders. Shiro rubs at a place where his belly still feels tight, and Keith’s entire body vibrates. The shiver wracks him good. Makes him yank on Shiro’s hair again and makes his arms tense up so much that his still-latent muscles push out against their exoskeleton of chub. Trying to catch another breath, Keith pants. Can’t get it in too far. His hips squirm and his thighs jiggle against each other and as he throws his head back, he slams his belly into Shiro’s mouth. All but chokes him, and Shiro wouldn’t mind if Keith went all the way with that, not that he ever _would_, but God, a rush of heat and _want want want_ clenches around Shiro’s insides, at the mere thought of that—

And then, tremors burst out all over Keith. His limbs tremble. His throat and lips quiver like they might never stop. The sound that he can’t keep from jerking free of his self-restraint—the noise that stumbles out of him despite his attempts at holding back, more unsteady than Keith gets when he’s had a few too many rounds of Jack-and-Coke and shivering more than anything else about Keith now—_God_, that sound comes from somewhere gutturally deep in Keith. It uses his entire throat and sounds like his lungs could claw their way up out of him—

Then, as quickly as it started, Keith lets out a high, tight whimper and the wind drops from his sails. The hand in Shiro’s hair drops down to his shoulder. All over, Keith goes so slack that he must only stay up because his other hand’s already braced against the mattress. His entire face is strawberry red as he shuts his eyes and tries to catch his breath for real, and Shiro has no idea how he’s holding himself back anymore. How he’s got his own desire leashed up so tightly and how he’s resisting the impulse to let go of Keith’s belly and jerk off already.

How he’s keeping himself from getting a similar dark, damp stain to the one all over Keith’s underwear, glaring up at Shiro with the evidence and a painful reminder of what he just did to his best friend. Shiro swallows thickly, slouches under the realization that he probably just crossed a million different lines. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the red light of his right-hand camera and feels the color seeping out of his cheeks. His heart leaps into his throat when Keith jostles that beautiful belly against his palm, but it plummets to the lowest point in Shiro’s chest at the breathy, longing noise Keith makes.

Oh, no. Oh, God. He’s going to kill Shiro for this, after all the effort that he put into the clip—

“Oh, my _God_,” Keith mutters offhandedly, then sighs in something that would sound like pure relief under any normal circumstances. “_Jesus_, that was good…” He tries to add something else, but only comes up with syllables that add up to nothing in particular. Another sigh, and he opens his eyes, flutters those long, soft lashes down at Shiro but doesn’t smile—

Shiro jerks his hands back and holds them up in surrender. So Keith can see exactly where they are and everything that Shiro isn’t doing with them. God, would it kill his cock to stop insisting upon itself? At the very least, it could give up when Keith furrows his brow as if he honestly can’t comprehend what’s going on. As if anything about this situation needs explaining. Shiro eases himself to his feet, in case Keith’s feeling tense or nervous. In case he might misread anything about this as an attack when it’s really quite the opposite.

“Sorry, I’m just…” Shiro ducks his chin. His cheeks heat up again and make him feel like he could be sick. “You looked—I mean, I thought you were—I didn’t mean? But, like, I did? But not in any kind of _bad_—I thought you were in _pain_, I just…”

He shakes his head and sighs. “I’m sorry. I’ll just be… You remember how to turn off the cameras, right?”

Still looking like he’s lost without a map, Keith nods, which is all that Shiro needs.

Skittering to the bathroom, he glues his eyes to the hardwood floor. Stripping out of his clothes, he can’t look his reflection in the eye. He can barely look at his own body—catching a stray glimpse of his abs disgusts him more than he ever felt with himself when he was fat—and as he slumps against the back wall of the shower, he shuts his eyes. Doesn’t even take out his ponytail before he turns the water on. He’ll regret it later, when he washes off again, but right now, it’s just whatever. Too much energy to care.

Wrapping a hand around his hot, aching cock, Shiro resolves to swallow any noises that might come up. After everything he’s just loused up, at least he can hold back on that much. At least he can keep Keith from having to hear the evidence of how Shiro really feels. The proof positive that Shiro is some kind of freak, and he screwed up Keith’s video and now he’s getting off on the memory of how Keith’s belly felt between his hands, on ideas of how Keith’s thighs would feel, all plump and soft and jiggling as they envelop Shiro’s hips… Notions of Keith sitting on his chest, bearing down on him with every single extra pound, pinning Shiro to the nearest flat surface with all his extra weight… He forces every noise his body threatens him with down inside of him where it belongs, because Keith doesn’t need all this unadulterated _garbage_—

Even when Shiro comes, he doesn’t make a sound. He’s had less satisfying jerk-off sessions before this one and with the way his luck goes, he absolutely will again. The only reason that this one is different is how his chest feels in the aftermath. As Shiro rips off his elastic and tosses it aside—as he tries to ruffle his hair when it’s already matted, soaked, and clinging to his neck—it feels like something’s squirming deep inside his lungs. Like something’s taking root and tickling him, as if he needed any more reminders that he ruins everything.

Squirting out shampoo, Shiro tries to focus on the smell of it, the coolness along his scalp. Tries to put any inconvenient feelings aside and lose himself in scrubbing his hair as if that’s going to fix anything. As if he can undo the damage that he just did to Keith’s clip and, by extension, to his second job.

Still, it could be worse. Maybe Shiro’s a total idiot and maybe he’s hopelessly, irreparably in love with a guy he has never deserved and never will, who incidentally is also his best friend. But at least he has somewhere to sleep at night. At least he has friends who more or less love him and usually don’t mind having him around. At least he’s in good health. Whatever’s going on with his chest—assuming that it’s anything but guilt-sickness that Shiro ought to wallow in, after what he’s done—it’s probably one of the obnoxious, two-day bugs that crop up after long flights.

For all the unrequited love he carries and the torch that Keith can never know about because of how much better he deserves, at least Shiro’s brokenness works to his advantage, in one way. At least he’s so shattered on such an unfathomably fundamental level that he’s never once had Hanahaki over anybody.

It isn’t much consolation, thinking about how there’s something wrong with him. But hey, Shiro doesn’t need to worry about coughing up flower petals all over everything, which has to count for _something_. Anyway, he’s not in any place to argue. He needs to keep his lips zipped, keep his feelings stifled, and take whatever he can get.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ……And then I went to bed and left these chapters here because I have so much more to post yet, but on the other hand, it’s almost 6AM and my dominant hand wrist is killing me.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Shiro and Hunk have some emotions at each other, Shiro gets his first Hanahaki flareup, and Lotor probably doesn’t deserve any of this.
> 
> —Also, it occurs to me that I forgot to mention: the title of this fic comes from the song “Breathe,” originally by Greenwheel and famously covered by Melissa Etheridge. The song has very little to do with this fic; I just like it and thought that the lyric was perfect for a Hanahaki fic.

Imbroglio is the sort of place that, even on the other side of dieting in California, Shiro would never visit willingly. For one thing, despite having a menu that largely wouldn’t be out-of-place in a cheap diner, it’s so self-insistent on how _cool _and _posh_ and _hip_ it is, name-dropping specific spices and cooking styles that nobody has ever heard of, rubbing everyone’s faces in the way the kitchen staff makes even pizza sound ridiculously upper-crust and fancy.

For another thing, the atmosphere’s uncomfortable. The interior may not be cramped, but it’s far from spacious. The lighting mostly comes from candles set out on every table, with only dim lamps supplementing it. Considering how much the food costs here, it’s weird that there’s hardly any room in here and weirder still that they keep the lights so low. But Shiro can’t change the building or the city planning codes around it. He can’t do anything about the lighting without blaming the waitstaff for things that aren’t their fault or anything they can control.

Finally, Allura’s parents are getting the bill tonight. For the rest of The Gang, this means that they’re allowed to order whatever they want, content in the knowledge that Alfor, Coran, and Melenor can afford absolutely anything. For Shiro, it’s carte blanche to focus on simply getting through the evening without any sort of incident—but the fact that he needs to think in those terms in the first place? Makes his throat feel like it’s coated in a mucus-skin of guilt.

The folks at Imbroglio set The Gang up with the so-called party room—fittingly, since the list of guests tonight is Acxa, Allura, Ezor, Hunk, Keith, Lance, Lotor, Matt, Narti, Nyma, Rolo, Ryou, Shay, Shiro, Sven, and Zethrid, and all sixteen of them need enough space that Shiro’s actually glad that Iverson couldn’t make it—but even that feels like the walls might start closing in at any minute. They sit around smaller tables that have been arranged into a makeshift longer one, and if they’d focus on Hunk, then maybe everything would be okay. After all, it _is_ gonna be his birthday, this weekend. The only reason why they’re having this party for him four days early is that he can’t get Saturday evening off from Sal’s.

That, and the part where Shiro and Lotor came back from Los Angeles. Ignoring that would be nicer. But when Shiro first walks in, Ezor about chokes on her Cherry Coke from simply looking at him. As more people filter in and order drinks, everyone keeps glancing down the table at Shiro. He’s sitting opposite Hunk, and all the looks in their direction would be fine if people were looking at the real Birthday Boy. If they were paying attention to the guy here who really deserves to have the evening be about him.

But every time someone decides that they need to look, they turn their eyes on Shiro instead. They stare at him openly, dragging their gazes up and down his body. Eyebrows arch, people squint, and Narti whispers something that Shiro can’t hear but it makes Zethrid snort appreciatively and drawl, _“Yeah, I know, right? It’s like one of Lotor’s Ken dolls came to life.”_

Although his hands tremble and itch to do something other than sit here and take it, Shiro holds his tongue about that retort. He bites his lip when Nyma asks if she can bounce a quarter off his pecs and Pidge starts trying to tell her girlfriend why Imbroglio’s management wouldn’t appreciate them trying that inside the restaurant. He asks for some more water and a pot of green tea. He counts to twenty in his head, chews on the inside of his cheek, and digs his fingertips into his knee. Whatever it takes and however much it kills him, Shiro cannot ruin tonight for Hunk. Not after rendering Keith’s latest video salvageable but so far off the mark from what Keith intended to do.

When the waitress comes back to get a list of appetizers for everybody, Hunk looks up from the menu. Shiro swallows thickly and forces himself to keep sitting up straight. Maybe Hunk’s dead-eyed glare sends chills through his body like he’s gotten ten gallons of ice water dumped on him. Maybe he’s been looking at Shiro like that since he first got home and found Shiro arguing with Keith about whether the black button-up or the purple one was better for dinner tonight. There’s nothing Shiro can do except for take it on the chin, though.

That, and acknowledge food, apparently. Hunk seems to relax when Shiro chimes in about getting the calamari—but not a moment later, he purses his lips and arches an eyebrow as if he doesn’t trust Shiro in the slightest.

Which is fair enough, since Shiro plans to eat exactly none of the calamari, none of the onion rings that Pidge and Keith put in for, none of the mozzarella sticks, and none of the garlic knots that Lance insists they order because he’s a creature of habit and will never love any food as much as he loves garlic knots. Much as he’d prefer to argue, Shiro deserves it when Allura, Lance, and Ryou join Hunk in narrowing their eyes at him. Ryou, in particular, frowns and rolls his eyes at Shiro’s midsection—and Shiro can’t say “boo” to any of them because he’s _earned_ those Pointed Looks.

Regardless, Shiro shrugs over at his brother like he has no idea what Ryou thinks he’s on about. He wrinkles his nose right back at Hunk, even though Hunk deserves absolutely none of this. Without missing a beat, he suggests that they get some meatballs (because Keith loves meatballs, no matter who’s making them or out of what). He tacks on a couple baskets of the wings as well. They’re not wings in the usual sense, because Imbroglio caters predominantly to hipsters who can’t eat chicken without dressing it up in _tarragon-teriyaki sauté blends_ and other unholy-sounding combinations of sauces, spices, and miscellaneous dressings on the meat.

Still, if it proves that no one needs to worry about him, then Shiro will order anything.

Besides it’s not like anybody will find cause for worry, once dinner properly gets started. With everybody sharing the appetizers between the lot of them, no one will notice if Shiro picks his way through a tomato salad instead of taking any of that overly carb-stuffed or fried garbage. It’s none of their business what he’s eating, anyway.

Unfortunately, as soon as they put in their entree orders, Allura decides to clear her throat. “So, _Shiro_… Are you feeling quite alright?”

When he furrows his brow and refuses to give her an answer, she angles toward him instead of taking even half a hint. She puts her elbows on the table and leans in conspiratorially. Part of him twists up happily, awash in warmth and safety and something inexplicable that feels the same juniberry flower shade of pink as her pretty little dress. He smiles when her eyes gleam like she’s getting up to something, because having her do so where he can see it again makes the realization hit him like a tidal wave: God, he _missed Allura_ more than he’s even realized.

Another round of chills crashes onto him when she goes on, though: “I only ask because you do _look_ quite different… Not necessarily in a _bad_ way, of course, I would hardly think to say that? But all the same, it’s…” She hums pensively, pursing her lips and clinking the ice cubes around her mint julep. “It is a rather abrupt change? And quite a bit to take in all at once?”

“You can speak plainly about it, _ōjo_,” Ryou chimes in, keeping his voice mild and his tone even. “Kashi lost a considerable amount of weight in California. He came back here looking like an underwear model, and it is more than a little bit startling for the rest of us.”

No doubt, he throws one of his pet names for Allura into the mix so that she won’t feel too horribly censored or like he’s telling her that she shouldn’t speak at all. Not that Ryou would ever say something like that to either her or Lance, but it’s easier to just avoid situations that might make either of them feel bad. It’s easier for everyone if they just exhibit consideration in the first place and stop any potential _Situations _before anything gets started.

“I wouldn’t say I look like an _underwear_ model,” Shiro mutters, reaching for his tea. “D’you know what kinda diet those guys have to, like—”

“I saw your abs this morning, though,” Lance chimes in. He pauses only to blow the wrapper off his straw, and to pout when it falls short of hitting Lotor between the eyes. “You _definitely_ look like you could be posing for some Calvin Klein shit. I mean, if you wanted to, right.”

“Which I rather doubt will ever happen,” says Ryou. “Not unless getting the abs you’ve always wanted has managed to—”

“I don’t wanna be an underwear model, okay? That’s one of the last things that I want.”

“Uhhh, based on the way your shirt fits?” Ezor chirps, grinning like she has a switchblade in her mouth instead of teeth. “I think I’m calling bullshit. Because you look totally ready to snap your way out of that poor thing.”

Keith grimaces and nudges his shoulder at Hunk’s. “What the fuck does that have to do with Shiro looking like an underwear model?”

Ezor shrugs. “You’ve gotta be nearly naked to do a job like that, don’t cha?”

“I suppose that Shiro could opt for something more tasteful than an advertising campaign like that,” Allura says, resting her chin on her palm. As Lance rubs a hand up and down her back, careful not to mess up her waist-length braid, she pouts in the same way that she does when she can’t figure out what a piece of art is supposed to be saying to her. “He could easily become a muse for a fashion designer? Or someone more avant garde, should he so desire—”

“Or he could continue working on our script with me, the same way that he has done,” Lotor drawls. He leans around Narti, so that he can look at Allura more directly. “Becoming a skinny bitch has not changed Shiro’s sense of priorities so radically, Duchess. Nor has it made him a completely different person. He has a hateful set of abdominal muscles lurking underneath his top, and he could knock out Joe Frazier or Evgeny Tishenko with his thighs. He is still the same _Star Trek_-loving George Michael fanboy aspiring filmmaker that we knew and loved before he decided to commit himself to losing weight.”

Flipping his cowlick off his face, Lotor squints as though he will fight the next person who tries to bring this up. “Whatever the rest of us think about his choices, we ought to respect each other enough to _drop the subject_ for the time being. We are here to reunite after far too long and celebrate Hunk’s birthday, _not_ to make Shiro miserable over life choices that we may or may not agree with.”

Lance groans. “Well, choices or no choices? I _still_ say that he looks like hashtag _‘Not My Shiro.’_

God, but Shiro wishes that he could hide inside his teacup.

He wishes that draining the thing could let him catch a break from feeling like everybody’s staring at him. He wishes that reaching for the pot could let him tune out what Acxa’s saying about how The Gang ought to be supportive because it’s no easy feat for _anybody_ to get abs, regardless of size, and with Shiro’s previous size and body composition, it must have taken that much more effort for him to do so. He wishes that he could lose awareness of everything that’s happening by focusing with enough intent on pouring his refill without spilling tea out on the tablecloth.

Then again, he also wishes that Hunk weren’t putting Shiro under an invisible microscope with the way he’s staring. Similarly, he used to wish that people wouldn’t fixate on him even though his size didn’t allow them to look at anybody else. Wishing for things never makes them happen without action—but there’s no action that Shiro can take in this situation. Not unless he wants to make things worse.

He says a silent prayer of thanks when the waitress comes back with one of her coworkers and two trays loaded up with appetizers. Everything is easier when people get distracted, and food provides an ample distraction for the table. In case it helps people believe that he’s doing perfectly fine, Shiro sucks it up and takes some of the calamari on a plate. If he _does_ decide to eat it, then it’s only a couple pieces. There’s protein in it, and it could be worse. He _could_ be trying to make himself eat something that he doesn’t even like.

Or, on the other hand, he could be sitting somewhere that doesn’t afford him a good vantage point to look at Keith. Despite how much he ate while shooting his clip earlier, Keith loads down two of the tiny plates with appetizers and goes to town without a second thought. No one questions this—by now, they must be used to it in the same way that Lotor’s gotten used to Shiro eating slowly, sparsely, and sticking to his meal-plans—but seeing it makes something thick and hot well up inside of Shiro’s throat. He holds his breath while watching Keith tear into his onion rings, so sure that he might miss something if he looks away for a single second.

Unruffled, Keith dips into some thick, red gunk that looks like marinara but, according to the menu, absolutely isn’t. The candlelight glistens off the sauce as Keith shoves an entire onion ring into his mouth at once. He sighs contentedly, but in a way that would no doubt be a moan if they were back in the relative safety of his bedroom. Away from any people who might judge him too harshly or make it more difficult for him to enjoy himself while eating.

Based on how Keith was talking earlier, Shiro doesn’t think that he minds being gawked at, in general. Based on the way he took it when Shiro started laying into him with insults, he might even _enjoy_ the way that people stare at him when he gorges himself in public.

Which makes no sense whatsoever, not to Shiro. Even since he’s gotten his weight under three-hundred pounds, eating out like this makes Shiro’s skin crawl as if he has worms and electric currents wriggling through his veins and muscles. Even now, surrounded by people who he _knows_ that he can mostly trust, he pokes at his salad and manages to get a few bites down, but even that feels like a herculean amount of effort. It’s so much easier for him to watch Keith eat than to actually eat himself, and he can’t fathom how anybody else with extra weight could feel comfortable eating around other people.

Yet, Keith might not see things that way. Once the onion rings are gone, he grabs up some of his calamari instead. One piece down, then he cuts open one of the garlic knots. Shiro furrows his brow at that, completely lost as to what Keith thinks he’s doing with his food—until Keith shoves two calamari rings between the chunks of bread and makes a mini-sandwich out of it.

Shiro hides behind his palm. Tries to pass off his sharp inhale as a yawn. Maybe he even does alright.

Keith’s eyes get a glint as if he knows what’s up, though. Dunking his sandwich-thing into the sauce, he smirks as though he can see right through Shiro. As Keith shoves that concoction of oddities into his mouth he fixes his eyes on Shiro, looks right at him as though nothing else in the entire universe will ever matter half as much as this moment between them, right here and now. God, but Shiro should look away. He knows how much it sucks to have people staring while you eat, and he _knows_ that he shouldn’t fixate on Keith like this. He _knows_ better—and yet, it’s like there are magnets in Keith’s cheeks that won’t let Shiro’s eyes wander anywhere.

Worse yet—at least in that it’s confusing and it leaves Shiro’s head feeling like it’s buried in a heavy, humid, thick, and fog-befuddled swamp that simply will not let him thing—Keith smiles at Shiro as he keeps eating.

Dimly, Shiro’s aware that other things are happening. He hears the din of the restaurant around them as Keith moans around his mini-sandwich. As he watches Keith licking the grease and sauce and spices off his fingertips, he hears the other patrons talking in a low buzz of voices so mingled that he can’t pick out what they’re saying. He hears the voices around the table—louder and sharper and clearer, by sheer virtue of being closer to Shiro than the rest of the diners or the waitstaff—and Shiro _knows_ that he ought to pay more attention because his friends deserve that much from him.

They deserve so much more than that, but if Shiro can’t expect anyone to really listen when he speaks tonight, then he could allow himself to settle for simply keeping up with the conversation. Sadly, none of the discussion fascinates as much as Keith. None of their other friends bring up anything that rivals the way Keith eats and the sounds he makes while stuffing his beautiful face with more food than he should be able to eat right now. Keith wipes his hand off on a napkin, then drops it to his stomach. He gives himself a gentle rubdown, kneading at his flesh in acknowledgement of how much he’s already eaten, but cramming another garlic knot past his teeth as though he’s famished.

In the back of his mind, Shiro can even pick out the fact that their friends start talking about him again before too long. Allura offhandedly mentions her suspicion that Nyma truly could bounce a quarter off of Shiro’s chest, if he were amenable to letting her. Hunk says nothing, but he rolls his eyes as if he wishes they could drop this conversation. Sven wonders if Shiro could deadlift Zethrid now, even when she’s still a good three or four inches taller than he is. Ryou supposes that his brother’s happiness is the most important thing in all of this, regardless of what anybody else might feel. Lance groans at Ezor about the crop-top that Shiro had on at the airport and how Shiro hadn’t even looked like himself, except for only vaguely.

Snarky and exasperated as ever, Lotor points out that Shiro wore it with the intent for _a certain_ _someone_ to see his eight-pack—knowing Lotor, he probably quirks his eyebrows at Keith, but Shiro can’t be bothered—and _apparently _didn’t think about other people’s reactions, _or so he claims_. Hunk shakes his head again, and Shiro doesn’t blame him, really. His knuckles strain as he pretends to be interested in whatever’s on his phone. Echoing what Lotor said earlier, Allura and Acxa balk at the idea that Shiro thought he could escape notice, looking like he does, especially if he saw fit to flaunt his physique in a crop top. Shiro’s teeth grind on each other of their own accord, and Hunk curls his free hand in a trembling fist. Under his breath, he suggests that maybe they could discuss something else.

Some faint part of Shiro wants to argue that he _wasn’t lying_ about thinking that nobody would notice him in the airport. Then again, that sounds like way too much effort. It sounds like he’d get dragged into a conversation from which Lotor would not back down, and then he’d need to rehash their same old arguments with everybody else instead of letting them go to bed, like they should’ve done ages ago already.

Worse, debating with Lotor might draw Shiro’s attention off of Keith. No matter where his mind belongs or not, Shiro doesn’t want to pay mind to anything else right now. He loves his friends, but they’re making his chest threaten to collapse in on itself. Listening to them makes breathing feel like a chore. Makes Shiro struggle to inhale, much less to feel like he’s getting any help out of each breath. His head spins like it could fall right off his neck, from the way Lance crows on and on and on, about how he’s pretty sure that Shiro wanted people to see his new abs and give him only glowing praise, because Shiro sure didn’t like it when Lance asked if he was sick, and Lotor kept ribbing him about how he wanted compliments on the gun-show that he’s packing in his biceps, and okay, he’s shredded like a fancy ass, expensive cheese—

Opposite Shiro, a chair jerks back and scrapes along the floor. Without a word, Hunk shoves himself to his feet. He mutters about needing to take a leak, which softens Lance up right away. Fair enough, since leaving like this usually means that Hunk really needs to put some space between himself and whatever conversation’s going on so he can feel free to breathe. But as he makes his exist, Hunk pats Lance’s shoulder and reassures him that he’s only going to be a moment, okay? He swears, he’ll be right back.

As soon as Hunk’s out of earshot, though, Lance sighs and rolls his eyes as though someone asked him to do the dishes when it’s not his turn to handle that. He slumps onto the table and rests his chin in his palm, then slouches against Allura—but only once she’s curled her arm around his skinny shoulders. Sitting opposite the two of them, Ryou scoots closer to the table and leans toward his significant others. He nudges a basket of fried zucchini sticks aside so he can hold Lance’s hand.

It’s a miracle that Shiro keeps himself from rolling his eyes. Not that he objects to Lance and Allura dating his brother. He doesn’t begrudge Ryou whatever happiness he can find in life, either. Still, if Keith ever wanted proof of how plausible it is that nobody’s really hit on Shiro since he slimmed down? Ryou’s as chunky as ever, probably still in the low-to-mid three-hundreds range himself, and he has _two_ beautiful, skinny datemates sitting with him, while Shiro’s thinner than he’s been in ages and he’s sitting over here, completely single.

“Look, what I don’t understand about this whole thing,” Lance says after a few moments, long enough for the silence to start digging its claws at the back of Shiro’s neck. Unfortunately, his tone screams that Lance has actually given this some thought. “It’s just? Why wouldn’t Shiro tell anybody back here about what he was doing? Or put it on Instagram, or Facebook—”

“He felt that the only way he could pursue what he wanted was to keep it from the rest of us,” Ryou points out, because they’ve had this discussion. He leans around their friends and frowns at Shiro as if he’s seeing something that offends all of his brotherly sensibilities. Purses his lips so tightly that they almost disappear into his face. “That was part of why he asked me not to tell anyone what was going on as well—”

“We could’ve supported him, though!”

_Sure, you **could** have supported me_, Shiro doesn’t allow himself to say because it’s probably unfair and cruel. _But I think both of us know you **wouldn’t** have, Lancey-Lance._

Whining gets Lance’s hand squeezed and his shoulder rubbed. But that contact doesn’t make him look any less aggrieved as he grouses, “That’s what friends are for, isn’t it? Supporting each other? Maybe he would’ve gotten support from us telling him that he’s being an idiot—but at least then? He wouldn’t look like he’s hashtag _‘Not My Shiro’_!””

“_He_ is sitting _right here_.” Rolling his eyes, Keith dunks a mozzarella stick into a container of spicy ranch dressing, then rips into it like he’d rather punch a wall.

“Well _good thing_ that he’s sitting here!” Lance squawks as if he can’t believe that Keith or anyone would ever dare to argue with him on the subject of Shiro, period. “He _should_ be here! He should hear everything that _everybody’s_ saying, and for _fuck’s sakes_, Mullet! How can you—”

“He has already heard most of it from _me_, Sir Lancelot.” Lotor glares daggers down the table, fixes his eyes on Lance as if begging him to start something. “You are helping nobody by rubbing our collective face in the fact that yes, Shiro desecrated a priceless and irreplaceable work of art by finally losing weight. Yes, he has abs now and we have truly lost a national treasure—”

“How in the _frack_ can you talk like that?”

“What issue are you taking _this_ time with the way that I talk—”

“I mean, how can you talk like that, then turn around and tell _me_ that _I’m_ the one who’s in the wrong—”

“Because you _are_ in the wrong, Lance. We are discussing _Shiro’s_ body and no one else’s. What is done with it, thus, is _his_ prerogative—”

“What if his prerogative is completely cheesing stupid, though? What if he’s giving in to people he shouldn’t even _dignify_—”

Lance keeps talking, but softly, something bats at Shiro’s ankle. That jerks him out of listening to the conversation. Another gentle kick helps him turn his eyes toward Keith. Shiro must look like some kind of train-wreck, for Keith to knot his brow up with concern like that. He doesn’t _feel_ like he’s trembling, and he doesn’t _feel_ like reaching for his Xanax. He probably won’t get stress-sick if he stays here, but—

“I’m not _saying_ that Shiro isn’t hot, Prince Loser! Obviously, he’s fucking _gorgeous_. All I’m saying is—”

“A bunch of derivative rubbish that I have already been telling him for _months_. That is all that you are saying—”

Leaning closer to Keith, Shiro whispers, “I’m gonna go check on Hunk, okay? I’ll be right back.”

While Shiro’s getting up, Keith nods as if he understands the real meaning here. Lotor gives Shiro a similar nod as he makes a beeline for the door. Not that the Shiro’s true intentions are particularly cryptic. He needs space from the others because he might not be able to breathe if he listens to too much more of this. Once he clears his head and makes sure that Hunk is doing fine? Shiro will come back and get through dinner like a responsible adult who loves his friends and isn’t sitting on a Whack-A-Mole game of messy neuroses and tangled emotional issues.

When he finds Hunk in the corridor by the restrooms, though, heading back to the party sounds like a recipe for certain doom. Never mind the fact that Shiro has a vise clenching tight around his lungs while a hurricane rages inside of them. Hunk’s got his shoulders hunched up like an agitated cat. Folding his arms across his chest does nothing to hide his belly—still big, still soft, and still straining against the buttons on Hunk’s sunflower yellow Oxford—and his posture makes his flab pooch out that much more. He shrugs when Shiro asks if he can join him for a while, supposes that he couldn’t stop Shiro, even if he did say _no_.

“Which I’m not doing, because it’s _fine_, but…” Hunk shakes his head. “You know what I mean, man?”

Shiro nods as he leans beside Hunk, because he _should_ know what his friend thinks he means by saying this. There are several possibilities, but none really stands out as more or less likely than any others. Which probably makes Shiro kind of awful, as a friend, but for now, he focuses on his breathing. On the tension radiating off of Hunk. On trying to find something he can say that might make everything better for—

“So… What’s up?”

Hunk shrugs. Scoffs. Deadpans, “The ceiling. Same as usual.”

“Um, yeah, true… That’s fair, I guess…” And Shiro probably deserves that for asking such a stupid question. After a moment’s consideration, he tries again and tells Hunk, “Look, I’m sorry about what’s going on back there, it’s not like—”

“_Don’t_, okay,” Hunk snaps and squirms along the wall as if he can’t get comfortable. “_Please_, man, just… Don’t.”

Which is likely fair enough as well, and Shiro only barely catches himself before he lets another apology leave his mouth.

God, why would Hunk want to hear Shiro say he’s sorry? Keith didn’t want to hear it either, and Shiro’s probably used up most of his good luck—as if he ever had any to begin with. If he’d ever had good luck, then maybe he’d already be Keith’s boyfriend. Or maybe he never would’ve split up with Maurice. Or maybe he never would’ve gotten fat back in middle school, and then he likely never would’ve dated Lotor, and now, he’d have a fiancé and two dogs and an easy, normal life, instead of a screenplay that has no funding, a fetish that he has to keep hidden, a surgical scar and stretch-marks, and a refillable prescription for Xanax.

For another long moment, Shiro hugs himself and goes silent. Maybe he needs to ease Hunk into a conversation in a different way. Going into things directly might be putting him on the defensive in unhelpful ways, and if so, then Shiro can’t exactly judge him for it.

“I learned how to cook in California,” Shiro says and hopes that it sounds offhanded. He feels like he’d rather fall off a cliff than try to continue being a person, at the moment—but he needs to get through this talk for Hunks’ sake. Since running would only make things worse, Shiro will settle for sounding like everything’s okay. “I mean, it’s not like I can do anything too fancy? But I’m not a menace in the kitchen anymore. I even got Lotor to like some of it, though…”

Shiro flips his white fringe off his face and puts on his patented Lotor Drawl. “‘Hunk would have done it infinitely better and certainly with more creative presentation. But in lieu of his artistry, darling? I suppose that it’s acceptable.’” Giving Hunk a small, warm smile, Shiro adds, “That’s not verbatim, exactly? But he said a lot of things like that, just that you would’ve done it better—”

“That’s to be _expected_, dude.” Hunk’s words are going for a toned-down approach, trying to use the velvet glove and not the iron fist. But the way his face falls and his eyes glaze over? That screams one thing only: _No shit, Shiro. You don’t say._

“Yeah, I know, I just…” Shiro quirks his shoulders. “I mean, I could’ve burned water before we left—”

“No, I mean that I cook for a living,” Hunk cuts in with a heavy sigh. “Of course you don’t do as well as I do in a kitchen. That kind of artistry is how I make my living. You’re more about having it be _functional_…” He straightens up without letting any tension go. “But… Good job, I guess? Nice to know that you won’t _starve_ if me and Keith both go out of town or something.”

Too obvious to miss, the inflection smacks Shiro in the face. He shrinks against the wall, as though that will do literally anything to hide what Hunk’s upset about. His abs—because of course Hunk has a problem with them, too.

But Shiro nods in silence, because arguing about it hasn’t worked with anyone so far. Right now, Hunk won’t believe that Shiro doesn’t skip meals like he used to anymore. Sure, he might _want_ to believe Shiro about that, but he won’t. So, Shiro leaves that statement well enough alone. He takes another moment, tries to think of anything else that he can say—

“Thanks for sending all the care packages, by the way? Especially for birthdays. And when we couldn’t get home for Christmas…”

Shiro wilts as Hunk frowns at him like, _“Do you honestly expect me to believe that you ate anything I sent you?”_

Again, Shiro nods. “It meant a lot. That you sent them—”

“Yeah, no, what are friends for, right? Besides, having your aunts around isn’t the same as having a taste of home…” Hunk shrugs, but there’s nothing casual about it. Nothing that says they can get back to business as usual anytime tonight. “Look, if Lance sent you? You can tell him to calm down. I needed some space, but I’m not gonna have a panic attack or anything.”

Shiro’s lips try to frown, but he forces them to stay neutral instead. “Lance didn’t… I came to… I wanted to see if you needed—”

“There’s nothing you can do for me right now, okay. Not unless getting abs made you a freaking wizard. Or, I don’t know, maybe if they can cast _Charm person_ and get everybody talking about something less…” Hunk leans forward so he can slump back all over again. His broad shoulders _thud!_ against the wall, and he grimaces as though he wishes he could just be sick and get it over with. “Y’know, _whatever_.”

_Great_, Shiro muses, staring at the vintage monster movie poster hanging opposite them. _All that talk about how I wouldn’t be a different person, no matter what I weighed, but when push shoves? I slimmed down, and got abs, and everyone I care about decides to hate me. So, ultimately, it really was just talk and none of you meant a single word of—_

“They aren’t magical. Just muscle,” Shiro says, trying to derail his own garbage thoughts as much as give Hunk a response. “And for what it’s worth, I’m sor—”

“Shiro. _Don’t_,” Hunk snaps. But he follows it with a heavy, earnest sigh. “You don’t have anything to apologize for. At least, you didn’t deliberately do anything wrong _tonight_. I’m tired and annoyed and hurting, but it’s not your fault.”

_Well, it sure feels like it’s my fault, dude—_

“And hey, I can’t argue one thing.” Hunk forces a smile, and almost seems like he means it. “You do look good.”

Shiro nearly manages to smile back. “Thanks, man. That means a lot. Especially with how everyone’s been—”

“But you looked good before, too.” Hunk’s lips quiver, looking like they could snap. “Really, man. You did.”

_Yeah, I totally looked good, and that’s why guys at bars either sneered down their noses at me or they ignored me, and I don’t know which one was worse… _Shiro can’t let himself say this—especially not when he knows that Hunk intends to help—but he also can’t help himself from thinking it. _That’s why those skinny twinks asked what I was doing at Pride, the one time when you and Keith and Lotor talked me into going. That’s why those guys said we didn’t belong there because we were giving everyone else a bad name. And I wasn’t even at my fattest, then—_

“Well, I didn’t _feel_ good before,” Shiro lets snap out, lest he get too lost in brooding.

Hunk’s tight, crestfallen, nauseated expression makes Shiro feel like he’s kicked a puppy. With a sigh, he knocks his head against the wall. Not hard enough to hurt, much less to make Shiro wake up in a version of his life where he hasn’t loused up everything he cared about by going after what he wanted. Or in another reality, like Sven’s whack-job boyfriend always talks about, maybe one where Shiro isn’t such a screw-up. But hey, the thump has enough force to keep him grounded for the time being, which is close enough for jazz and probably the best thing that Shiro’s gonna get right now.

Before he can decide how to apologize, Hunk cuts in with, “I know how that goes, not feeling good. Trust me, I do. But…” He nudges his shoulder into Shiro’s, and Shiro can’t tell whom this is supposed to comfort. “Are you happy this way? Like, are you _really_?”

“To quote Allura’s Magic Eight Ball? Ask again later,” Shiro deadpans. When Hunk rightfully huffs about that being a total cop-out, he shakes his head. “I can’t give you a better answer right now, okay? Ask again when I don’t feel like the five-year buildup of crusty stains in a gas station microwave.”

“That’s… evocative, I guess?” Hunk sighs like he can’t figure out what he wants to say. “I mean, I get being stressed out by the attention—”

“Obviously. You’re right here with me—”

“But come on, what did you _expect_ to happen? Did you expect Keith to swoon into your arms—”

“When I daydream? _I’m_ the one who does the swooning—”

“Did you think you’d come back and have Lance crowing about how great it is that you got conventionally hot? Or that Allura would get all like…” Hunk combs his bangs off his forehead, then clasps his hands together. In his sardonic _Allura_ voice, he coos, “Ooooh, Shiro, you look so fine, now that you aren’t fat. I can’t believe what a hottie you turned into after losing so much weight. The boys are all atwitter for you, including Keith especially, and I’m blushing, but please don’t tell your brother, _ooooh_!”

Shiro’s face flushes hot. “You handled it fine when you got home—”

“Yeah, because Keith texted me a head’s up before your shoot. I would’ve lost it if he hadn’t.”

“But it’s nobody else’s _business_, right?” Maybe he shouldn’t roll his eyes. Maybe hugging himself so tightly is the behavior of somebody who isn’t doing fine. Maybe Shiro should do a lot of things differently because perhaps, he isn’t helping his case that he’s completely fine by acting like such a brat. But Shiro can’t stop himself from admitting, “It’s _my_ body and I did what I wanted with it. Don’t I get the right to decide what I do with _my_ body? If I want to lose weight, then why can’t I do it without everybody telling me I’m wrong and trying to make me stop?”

“I don’t think anybody’s saying that you don’t have a right to make your own decisions. And I don’t think us being concerned about you is the same as us telling you what to do with your body.” Hunk’s face screws up like he can’t tell whether he should be sympathetic or exasperated. “But seriously, what do you even need to do to keep yourself looking like that?”

“Working out and eating right,” Shiro says flatly, because this honestly should be obvious.

All Hunk does is arch an eyebrow like he knows that Shiro’s redacting several very important pieces of this story. That is, several pieces of the story that other people would find important, whether Shiro particularly agrees or not. Shiro’s skin crawls guiltily, because maybe Hunk has a point in looking at him like that, and maybe Lance had a point in asking if he was sick, and maybe everyone has had some kind of point or other in asking about Shiro’s happiness as though he can’t determine for himself what makes that up. For a moment, thinking about how to answer is all Shiro can do.

Unfortunately, thinking about what he wants to say requires that he look away from Hunk. Even if Hunk doesn’t do the same, Shiro can’t handle _seeing_ the way that Hunk narrows his eyes. The way he frowns like he’s trying to be stern while feeling like he might be sick before too long. The way his entire body radiates the sort of tension that can’t be cleared up by a nice massage or having a couple drinks or getting kissed by someone who knows what they’re doing with their mouth.

Putting that thought aside, Shiro angles himself away from Hunk. He leans off the wall and lets his eyes meander all over the restaurant, from the one hostess who smiles like she might start crying at any second to the older couple at one table who almost look like Zarkon and Honerva (more specifically: they look how Lotor’s parents might appear if either of them had a fraction of a soul). Shiro rolls his lip between his teeth without biting down too hard because Hunk might notice if he put himself in real pain, which would lead to Hunk telling somebody, which would be more trouble than it’s worth.

Shiro would catch a better break if he could have more space. Which is stupid, since he’s the one intruding on Hunk and not the other way around. Regardless, he swallows thickly and keeps looking elsewhere, trying to settle his mind as much as possible. As he takes in the sights around them, Shiro almost lets himself breathe easier—until his eyes land on Keith.

Frankly, it’s ridiculous for his throat to close up around itself. Even if Shiro’s been away from Keith for so long, he _knows_ what Keith looks like. Even if Keith’s gained weight and even if the sight of him makes Shiro’s mouth go dry, it’s probably seventeen kinds of hypocritical—at the _very_ least—for Shiro to be ogling Keith as he shoves a handful of zucchini fries into his mouth. The lighting might be too low for Shiro to properly appreciate the sight, but that won’t stop him from ogling, especially since Keith probably can’t see him at the moment, either.

Regardless of the specifics giving him some trouble, he sees Keith’s cheeks puffing out. He sees the way Keith slouches onto the table. As slightly blurred and fuzzy as it looks from here, he sees Keith’s face twisting up in pleasure and Shiro can practically hear the way that Keith might be moaning. God, what he wouldn’t give to rub Keith’s stomach all over again. He’s had a hit—he’s sunk his fingers into that warm, soft flesh and kneaded at Keith’s belly when he’d stuffed it drum-tight full of food—and knowing that Keith will never want that kind of touch from him again? Knowing that he likely only tolerated it this time because he was hurting and it didn’t make his clip unsalvageable? That stabs Shiro in the heart almost as much as knowing that Keith’s mad at him and he can’t even argue over why.

A hand lands heavily on Shiro’s shoulder. His breath shocks into him, and something cold jolts through his body, down his spine. _What the Hell—who could even—oh wait, it’s Hunk_… Shiro tries to take a deep breath because there’s no good reason for him to get off-kilter in any way. It almost feels relaxing. It almost feels good. It almost feels like Shiro’s calming down effectively and getting everything together so that he could maybe pass for a normal human being.

But Hunk pats him again. And he squeezes gently. And another breath helps nothing. Shiro’s lungs shudder, and he starts coughing.

Rolling his eyes, he covers his mouth with his wrist. Tries to muffle the coughs so that they’ll be less annoying and less likely to spread any germs he’s incubating. That’s what works best for Shiro—except this time, his lungs shiver like they’ve been thrown headlong into an ice-bath. They stutter as if they might chill out and let him catch a break. But they refuse.

As much as he can right now, Shiro realizes that this coughing is some kind of monster. He’s never had a fit like this in his life. Each cough sends tremors through his back and shoulders, hits him deep enough to hurt. Each spasm claws along his insides and comes up feeling painfully unsatisfied, like there’s something that Shiro hasn’t yet expelled. With each breath in, Shiro aches and hopes that this time, he’ll find the magic secret. That he’ll unlock exactly what he needs to calm down and get himself together. That he’ll stop coughing, or at least that he’ll knock _something_ loose and make this stop.

Looking to Keith for a sense of grounding doesn’t help Shiro, either. Not that he expects Keith to charge in on a white stallion, broadsword drawn and eyes blazing with the need to save Shiro from whatever wanted to do him harm. But even knowing that Keith’s mad at him, he’s a calming presence for Shiro. Looking at him makes that warm, familiar, inexplicably _pink_ feeling flood softly over Shiro’s chest, and it makes his heart flutter around his chest like a leaf caught up on a wind that it can’t handle, and the insides of Shiro’s arms itch so badly that he wants to claw off all his skin because he can’t touch Keith again, the way he did this afternoon, and maybe nothing else will fight this feeling back into submission—

All of which makes his lungs clap back harder. They bang against Shiro’s rib-cage like a pair of thunderclouds getting ready for a storm. Heavy—it’s like there’s a _literal _ten-ton weight bearing down on Shiro’s chest. That’s what his lungs think they’re fighting against. That’s the only explanation for why they’re going in so hard. They flail as if they want to burst clean out of him. They force out more air as though the oxygen itself is poisonous, as if it might try to choke him from the inside. They leave Shiro mewling in between his spasms, whining despite himself because he can hardly get enough of a breath to stay on his own two feet much less put in the effort to avoid whimpering like some pathetic weakling. Like the guy he’s spent his adult life trying _not _to be.

As he buries his face in the crook of his elbow, Hunk tugs on Shiro’s shoulder, guides him into leaning on the wall again. That takes some of the edge off, Shiro guesses. Better yet, he doesn’t need to let anybody hear him sniveling. Hunk can probably make it out between the coughs, because he’s right here—but Hunk is safe. Shiro can trust him.

Whispering reassurances that everything will be alright, Hunk rubs the back of his hand up and down Shiro’s bicep. His fingers are large and soft. Still, he puts enough effort into it that, even through his jacket and his shirt, Shiro feels as if he’s getting hugged. He doesn’t think he’d mind a proper hug, but it might not help him put a stop to this, whatever this is. With his muscles screaming out in protest, Shiro’s eyes water of their own accord. His knees quiver like leaning on the wall is not enough to keep Shiro standing. Like they might still give out beneath him because they’re morally offended by his wish to stay on his own two feet.

Still, he _needs_ to get everything back together. Drawing in as deep a breath as he can catch, Shiro holds it for a count of five. He forces himself to let it out slowly, then to take a even longer inhaling on a new one. Thank God that he’s expanded his lung capacity in California. Thank God he’s learned to work out like he means it and can make each breath count for more than he used to believe possible. Thank God he knows, now, that he can set his mind to a goal and see it through until he’s finished.

It takes six rounds of breathing like he’s in a yoga class, but Shiro manages to regain some semblance of control.

Once he has that sense of footing back, it takes another few moments for him to trust in that. How many times has he ever felt like he had everything handled, only to miss something important and get the rug ripped out from under his feet because he didn’t pay the right kind of attention to the right things? How many times has he effectively knocked himself onto his own ass through letting himself feel secure in anything too early?

Yet, as Hunk squeezes his arm and asks if he’s okay, Shiro nods. He means it, too. There’s no good reason why he shouldn’t be okay.

“Must be a delayed reaction to the flight or something,” he says, voice barely above a whisper because, secure or not, Shiro still needs to catch his breath to some degree. His lungs feel like Bambi learning how to walk and falling all over themselves. “I mean, airplanes are basically flying petri dishes… And the woman we were next to in the row was, like?” Shiro quirks his shoulders because he doesn’t _really_ want to bad-mouth that poor lady. “Anyway, I’ll be fine.”

“I dunno, man.” Hunk’s voice is gentle, like he’s trying his best to be patient when he thinks that someone’s being a truly record-breaking kind of stupid. “Not trying to talk over you about how that felt, but… That sounded really nasty? And with how you handled your pneumonia—”

“That was _years_ ago. Is anybody _ever_ gonna let it go?” Hearing himself, Shiro wilts. Looking at the crumpled, mixed up expression on Hunk’s face, he wishes that he could fade into the paint. “Look, I don’t know where that came from, either. But it probably isn’t worth a trip to the ER and I can’t call my old primary care doc right now because it’s after-hours for her office. If that cough is still bugging me in the morning, I will call her, though.” He holds up his right hand. “Scout’s honor.”

“You can’t make a Scout’s honor promise if you’ve never been a Scout.” For once, the roll of Hunk’s eyes is more affectionate than not. “Or, y’know… If you were only a Scout for, like, two weeks? Three? Something like that.”

“Me and Ryou lasted six weeks, thanks. And hey, it isn’t _my_ fault that I’m too breathtaking for the Boy Scouts.” Shiro’s smile feels faint and wobbly, but at least it also feels earnest. “Or that I was too gay for them, either.” He sucks in a bone-deep breath and says a silent prayer of thanks when it doesn’t lead to another coughing fit. “Not my fault that Ojiisan had principles, either. Pulled us out as soon as I mentioned liking boys so I wouldn’t have to hear any homophobic shit and Ryou wouldn’t get in trouble for defending me.”

Hunk nods, sympathy gleaming in his eyes. “Your Grandfather did right by me. Wish I could’ve met him.”

“He would’ve loved you… Probably would’ve wanted me or Ryou to marry you so he could have you in the family as a grandson-in-law… Anybody in their right mind would, but—” An odd noise comes out of Shiro’s throat as he forces himself to choke back a cough before it starts. No. No more of that, thank you. He won’t be doing that again, so help him God. “But Ojiisan would’ve seen you as unofficial family, no matter what happened. He did with Keith and he didn’t even know how—”

“Shiro, that’s _great_ and all, but…?” Hunk’s squeezes Shiro’s shoulder more tightly than he has so far tonight. Whatever’s making his eyes glimmer now, it isn’t sympathy. Instead, it makes Shiro’s stomach twist around itself uncomfortably, jerking and reeling like Shiro’s gotten punched from out of nowhere. The chill of guilt weighs him down like he has bricks of ice inside his chest, and Hunk frowns as if he feels even worse for what he’s about to say. “What you were saying before you started coughing. Can we go back to that? ‘cause I’m _serious_, man…”

Preemptively, he holds up his free hand in mock surrender. Wide-eyed, he watches Shiro as if he’s waiting for a snake to jump out and bite him. “I’m not saying that you don’t look good, Shiro, because you do. And I’m not saying that you can’t do what makes you happy because of course you can. That’s kinda how free choice _works_—”

“Sounds like there’s a _but_ coming here. Or like you’re tiptoeing around blaming me for—”

“_But_…” Hunk’s eyes flash dangerously. Not even daring Shiro to speak up at his peril, just telling him to shut up and listen. “What did you have to do to get a body like that? And what are you gonna have to do to maintain that tone?”

“Not as much as Hugh Jackman when he still played Wolverine—”

“That’s, like, the exact _opposite_ of a helpful answer, man. ‘cause he had to do a _lot_ to keep himself ripped like that—”

“I _know_, okay? Lotor told me all about it. He pulled up interview after interview to prove it. And then the nutritionist and the doctor I worked with in LA told me more or less the exact same thing. It was, like…” Shiro only means to catch a deep breath, and he cringes internally when it comes out as a sigh. “God, could I sound any more like somebody won‘t let me have a pony for my birthday?”

“You sound more like you‘re… I dunno, exasperated? And kinda tired? And not like the, ‘Well, _duh_, Hunk, I just got done coughing up my lungs’ kind of tired? Not the, ‘I had a red-eye back from LAX this morning and I probably didn’t sleep too well’ kind of tired, either…” Hunk helps himself to a sigh and takes a moment to think things over. “I mean, you wanted that for so long, and movies really _do_ make you feel like it should be easy—”

“Dude, it was hard enough to get down to looking like a seven-and-a-half out of ten. I can’t even _imagine_, like, not really—” As his brain catches up with his mouth, Shiro trails off into a groan. He lets his head loll back into the wall without properly thwacking it. “I’m just, like… I don’t know what else to tell you about it, man? Diet and exercise, that was it.”

How can Hunk look curious but sympathetic while arching his eyebrow like he can literally smell the bullshit? How does a human being’s face have the right to be that level of expressive and convey so many sentiments at once?

Shiro’s shoulders droop. He relents, “Alright, I had _one_ bit of surgery, but—”

He cuts himself off. Whines as Hunk smacks his bicep. But his knuckles hit only half as hard as that steely, burning glare. Which still _sucks_. Even if it doesn’t hurt, not really—even if Hunk holds back, even if he refuses to give it his all and hit Shiro the way he could if he wanted—the smack knocks Shiro off his guard.

“_Surgery_, man?” He snaps. “And you didn’t tell us _why_, exact—”

“Because it wasn’t exactly _planned_—”

“And how about acting like you did all of this just naturally, all by _yourself_—”

“Because I _did_, okay!” Hugging himself tighter still, Shiro doesn’t allow himself to look away from Hunk. No matter how much his skin crawls—regardless of the hairs pricking up along the back of his neck—Shiro makes himself look Hunk in the eye. “I used diet and exercise to lose the weight, exactly like I told you. Lotor made me see a doctor. Dr. Carter had me bring in a nutritionist as well, and Dr. Hall—my therapist, out there—she kept tabs on the emotional side of things. I did everything the hard way. I _literally_ worked my ass off because it wasn’t about—”

“You _just said_ that you had _surgery_—”

“Yes! But only _after_ working to lose weight the hard way.” Shiro shrugs pointedly, even though he feels like one thing going wrong would make him start banshee screaming, right here, right now, right in the middle of this wannabe posh hipster restaurant. “Ryou and I were kinda chubby kids, right? Then came puberty, which is when I really started getting _fat_. My skin’s been stretching past its limit for me since I was twelve. So, even when I lost the weight, I had these loose folds, just these sagging, flapping empty husks of excess _skin_ that wouldn’t tone up, the way I wanted. You could _feel_ the muscle underneath them, but…”

Shiro sighs. Clamping down harder on his elbow, his hand trembles. His knuckles feel like they could split straight through his skin—but he has to get through this conversation. He needs to know that he _can_ do it. “Did I want to finally have visible abs? _Yes_. Obviously I did. But I worked with Dr. Hall about everything, and talking to her and Lotor? I started feeling like, ‘Yeah, okay. This is not _ideal_. Yes, it’s still gross and unsightly. Yes, makes my life that much harder because I slimmed down and I _still_ can’t find anything that fits me. But this is proof of how much work I did, and how far I’ve come, and I think I could get used to this if I give it time.’”

“So, what happened?” Hunk’s wearing the squinty, pouting look that usually accompanies him deciding that somebody has hurt his friends and now he’s going to hate that person until TBD. “Did your _boss_ make you get a tummy-tuck? Or some asshole you were dating—”

“I haven’t gotten hit on since I was around two-seventy-five. Except by this jerk we worked with, but I don’t…”

Shiro withers. He almost drops his chin and breaks off from looking at Hunk. He _deserves_ the glare that he’s getting—his stomach lurches with that knowledge, as if he’s hitting a sharp curve on a roller-coaster, because he can’t even be upset about this—and Shiro has to force himself to keep making eye-contact with his friend. But still, Shiro allows himself a soft sigh.

“I got an infection, okay?” Another sigh comes up before Shiro even gets a chance to tell it not to. “Having folds of skin like that… I had like, twenty extra pounds hanging around my stomach, just from skin. Which was getting annoying because I had a goal weight in mind and couldn’t get there. But I was working on everything, except for…” Shaking his head, Shiro rolls his eyes and hopes that Hunk knows it isn’t aimed at _him_. “Okay, fun fact? I sweat _more_ when I work out, now. Which seemed totally counter-intuitive, since there’s _less_ of me to lug around, but—”

“But your body’s gotten better at cooling itself off—”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what Dr. Carter and the people in the emergency room said.” Shiro swallows thickly lest he start coughing up his lungs again. He lets himself look down at the floor—and, by extension, at his significantly smaller midsection—because he might throw up, if he keeps looking Hunk in the eye. “But it was all so… The sweat kept getting in the folds. And there was _chafing _from how much I was moving around. So, throw in the sweat and I got a rash, and then it got infected, and then, and then, and _then_…”

His teeth grind on each other so closely that they might as well be glued together. Shiro’s tongue pops when he peels it off the roof of his mouth. It could be hilarious, if Shiro were anybody but himself or likely Hunk. Under other circumstances, he might allow himself to get a chuckle because he can never pull a tongue-pop off when he’s actually trying to do one.

For now, though, Shiro lets his eyes slip shut as he admits, “Right as I was getting more comfortable with how my stomach looked… Right as I started to believe that I would be _okay_ with never really having abs, the way I’ve wanted for _so long_?” A deep breath gives way to a bitter laugh, and Shiro’s lips strain themselves into a rictus grin. “Right as I’m finally making progress on really feeling _comfortable_ and wanting what I have, I get an infection. I’m in pain for days, nothing that I do makes it any better, Lotor drags me to the ER…”

His shoulders quirk without asking for his permission. “Ryou only heard about it because Lotor called Aunt Satomi when they admitted me,” Shiro whispers. “Then, we got caught up in our last semester, and putting together another backers’ party, and then there were finals, and we were getting ready for the Golden Globes even though we didn’t get to _go_ to them. And then, and then, and _then_, the way I said…”

It makes him feel like he has an iceberg lodged behind his Adam’s apple, but Shiro forces himself to meet Hunk’s eyes again. “I didn’t intentionally leave people out of the loop about this. And I wasn’t planning on keeping that fact from everyone forever, but…”

Hunk nods in understanding, but doesn’t say that anything’s okay. “I get it. And I’m sorry—”

“Don’t, okay? You’ve done nothing to be sorry for.” Shiro smiles earnestly, for all it’s tight-lipped and smaller than he’d like. It’s probably in the top ten most unconvincing smiles that Shiro’s ever worn, even though he means it.

Nudging his shoulder into Hunk’s, he says, “_I’m _sorry that I didn’t tell you about… Literally any of this. I mean, life was hectic with the surgery thing. Any time I thought about bringing it up, it felt like, ‘I am past my maximum limit enough already. I can’t handle telling the folks back home because they’re going to stress about it when they can’t do anything. That will make me feel terrible, which is gonna make these next few weeks even worse to get through’—”

“Guessing that’s why Ryou didn’t tell us, either—”

Shiro nods. “But as for the rest…” He nudges at Hunk again. Wishes that this could be a hug moment because he’d really like a hug. But Hunk feels too tense for that, right now, so Shiro keeps talking instead: “I don’t even have a good reason for why I kept things from everybody. I thought that telling one person meant that everybody in The Gang would know. Then, I felt like you’d all try to stop me, based on precedent? Even though I did everything right this time and didn’t hurt myself. And it’s not like I didn’t think about how people would react, because I did, but…”

As he rests his head on the wall again—feels his ponytail swish against the back of his neck—Shiro can’t help sighing. “I didn’t think that it’d be that big a deal,” he says. “I thought probably nobody would care that much about it. But you weren’t _completely_ wrong, either? I _did_ think _somebody_ would tell me that I got hot out in California… Or that I look so much _better_ now that I’ve lost weight… Or, I don’t know. I’d settle for _anything_ about me looking good that’s not sarcastic or begrudging…”

Another would-be cough prickles in the back of Shiro’s throat, but shuts up when he chokes it down. “Obviously? I guessed wrong.”

“In fairness? It’s a pretty drastic change, y’know? A lot to drop on everybody, all at once. A head’s up probably would’ve helped… Even just putting new selfies on Instagram. That would’ve been better than saying absolutely nothing.” Hunk makes a huffing sort of noise like he could go further down that path—like he could give Shiro a more strenuous calling-out for how he’s avoided putting pictures of himself on social media—but he doesn’t want to, at the moment. “Look: as soon as you stop listening to a doctor about this? I _will not_ hesitate to smack you—”

“And I’ll have no room to argue with you, if that happens. Because I will totally deserve it—”

“And I don’t know about the rest of The Gang, but? I’m not _mad_ about it. I’m still taking it in, but I’m _anxious_, not angry.”

Hunk bumps his shoulder into Shiro’s, this time. If they could make this a hug moment, that’d be great. But whatever Hunk’s really feeling, he doesn’t give off a hugging moment vibe. The way he frowns screams concern. Specifically, the sort of concern that usually means Hunk would prefer to be fixing things or cooking something, rather than hugging it all out. He’s making Shiro feel like he should literally clam up.

Not just go quiet, either. Hunk’s giving off a feeling like Shiro should go find a clam shell that’s big enough to keep him hidden, curl up inside of it, and lock himself away so he stops getting his rubbish problems all over everybody else.

It feels like Hunk wants to do the exact same thing. Whatever’s radiating off of him, it leaves Shiro with the distinct impression that Hunk would rather be anywhere else and preferably alone. If he had anybody else around him, it would probably be Lance, and Hunk would want him for the same reason that Shiro prefers to spend Bad Moods around Keith and Ryou: Hunk and Lance have known each other longer than they’ve known anybody else in The Gang. They’re best friends, and they turn to each other before almost anybody else.

But instead of running away or hiding, Hunk sighs and mirrors the way that Shiro’s standing: propped up on the wall and hugging himself again.

Watching Shiro closely, he goes on, “I worry about what might happen if you _can’t _maintain this look. Like, what if you get hurt or sick and you literally cannot keep up with the routine anymore? Based on your history, I’m concerned that you’re gonna flip out if you feel like you’re losing definition in your abs. Or that you might, I dunno, gain ten pounds and go back to beating yourself up about it.” He huffs—but Shiro gulped, so Hunk has reason. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. And I’m not gonna apologize for worrying about one of my best friends or letting you _know_ that I’m worried.”

“Nor should you. But as for the rest…” Shiro thinks about this question, because it deserves his full attention. Moreover, Hunk deserves for his concerns to be treated with respect instead of dismissed out of hand. “I only flinched because I deserved everything you said, but I still didn’t like hearing it. Because I don’t like that I’ve given everybody so much reason for concern—”

“Okay, that’s better than what I was thinking, but—”

“You had no reason to think it _wasn’t_ what you thought. It’s fine, Hunk.” Maybe not _that_ fine, but any upset is Shiro’s business and Shiro’s fault because _Shiro_ is the one who gave Hunk reason to think the way he did. “You aren’t in the wrong for worrying about how I’d handle gaining weight back, either. Lotor’s already expressed his concern. So did Dr. Hall. Ulaz will probably join them, once I get back in with him. Though, considering what Ulaz has had to deal with from me before? We might spend our first new session going over all the proof of how I didn’t _cheat_ about this, like _Lance_ thought, and I didn’t do it unhealthily. Or showing him my eighteen months of backlogged selfies—”

“Which is _great_ and all, but…” Hunk lets a soft, frustrated whine slip out. “I’m still worried more about _your_ reaction than anybody else’s.”

“I’ve been thinking about that on and off for _months_, and…” It’s such a cop-out, but Shiro shrugs and lets himself tell Hunk, “I don’t know how I’d feel about that or what I’d do. Right now? My ideal result is just never dealing with that situation in the first place, but that’s probably unrealistic—”

“Uh huh, in the same way that Lance _probably_ cares about his skincare, sure—”

“And I want to hope I’d be in a better place about it all? And that I’d take it on the chin because I’d be more secure in myself overall? And I really want to hope that I’d _know_ that I don’t need to have an eight-pack to be worth anything, because it’s crap for me to say that to everybody else and come up with different, unreachable standards for myself? But at the same time…?”

Soberly, Shiro forces himself to look Hunk in the eye. “In good conscience? I can’t promise you anything like that. I feel like I _have_ been making progress on managing my feelings better, and getting more comfortable in myself, but…” Guilt kicks Shiro in the stomach and makes him want to double over—but he doesn’t. He screws up his focus and gets through admitting, “It’s a work-in-progress, still. And if something like that happened tomorrow and knocked me off my game? I’d probably a total, self-loathing mess about it.”

The thought that sparks up in the back of his mind is anything but funny.

Yet, Shiro snorts a bit before confessing, “If I wound up in the hospital before I hit the gym tomorrow morning? Not getting in my daily ten-kay would throw me off because running helps me clear my head, now. But I’d probably have a _tantrum_ about missing Abs-And-Core Day.”

Trying to give Hunk a smile only makes him set his jaw. His eyes don’t quite glaze over, but as he fixes them on Shiro, they burn with an unspoken threat that Hunk will not let Shiro get away with anything like that, should it ever happen. Everything about him radiates a sentiment that feels an awful lot like, _“Don’t you even fucking joke about that, Shiro. If you ever pull a stunt like that, so help me God, you’ll be getting a broken nose fixed up, on top of whatever else might hypothetically be wrong, you neurotic, skinny bitch.”_

But without making any threats, Hunk nods. “Thanks for being honest with me, at least.”

“No sense in lying about it.” A sigh refuses to let Shiro hold it back. “Anyway, I’d hurt you and the others again if I lied about it now. Then, if it ever happened, you’d all be worried, sad, and disappointed, _and_ upset because I lied to you.”

Aside from that? They’d probably never trust him again, and apparently, Shiro’s messed that up enough already.

With that admission out there, he and Hunk both go quiet. In all likelihood, they should get back to the table. Neither of them’s panicking. Neither of them seems completely ill-at-ease. It’s rude for them to skip out on a dinner party for so long—not least when they and Lotor are the guests of honor for this evening. Failing that, then they need something else to talk about, because that way, they have a reason not to go back to their friends. Still, it seems like neither Hunk nor Shiro has anything to say.

In the silence, Shiro looks back to the party room—or more specifically, he looks back to Keith. He isn’t eating, at the moment. The appetizers are probably gone by now, and they entrees don’t seem to have arrived. Keith doesn’t need to eat, though. He’s distracting enough on his own, all slouched onto the table, resting his chin on one palm. The candlelight hits him perfectly, giving him the look of some chiaroscuro pairing. God, if Shiro ever tried to set up a shot like this, there’s no way that he’d manage to get it right. The white balance would be all off, or maybe the contrast wouldn’t look quite right… Reality would defy Shiro at every turn and refuse to let his cameras capture Keith’s beauty in the way that it deserves.

Worst of all, there’s no way that Shiro could make Keith’s stomach look right in this lighting. Even with his glasses on, he can barely see it in the first place. But the way Keith’s slouching makes his tummy pooch out toward his lap, makes it strain against the buttons of his candy apple red button-up.

Not that his belly needs too much help with that. Certainly not when it’s still bloated from his shoot earlier, never mind all of the appetizers. It already looks sufficiently big, especially when he doesn’t weigh nearly as much as he could. Keith cannot possibly be comfortable—no matter how much he enjoys this: he’s eaten enough today that he should be in pain, or getting sick, at least—but his face doesn’t show any signs of that. Shaking out his hair, he lets a hand drift up and down the pudgy swell. Pressing into one of the fullest-looking parts makes him screw up his face as if he’s moaning—

“Oh, my _God_,” Shiro whimpers, unable to help himself. His lungs clench up, and his knees tremble underneath him like they’re trying to give out, and his head spins as though he’s gonna faint onto Hunk’s chest. Gasping for breath feels like he’s got a chorus of razors lodged inside his chest—and still, Shiro keens softly, “How is anyone _allowed_ to be that beautiful?”

Watching Keith throw something from his coat pocket at Ezor, Shiro’s cheeks flush hotter than an oven. When Keith hits her in the forehead and he grins, Shiro feels like his heart could explode straight out of him. Slumping against the wall, he sighs and tells Hunk, “Even watching him is too, too much, I swear to _God_… He’s so gorgeous, I’m gonna cry tears of blood until I stop breathing and then _die_—”

Hunk laughs at that, and the roll of his eyes is audible. “There’s the big, gay, goth trash disaster I’ve been missing—”

“_Hunk_, come on! I’m being_ serious_—”

“You always are, dude! At least when it comes to Keith.” Which doesn’t stop Hunk from thwacking Shiro on the shoulder. “Honestly, you had _eighteen months_ to get your shit together on the Keith front. Can you _still_ not just tell him how you feel?”

“Well, not right now, obviously—”

“How is literally anything about this _obvious_—”

“How is literally anything about it all _opaque_?”

Shiro earns himself another thwack on the shoulder, for which he _should_ glare at Hunk. Because it’s honestly unfair—but Shiro can’t take his eyes off of Keith. Can’t look anywhere but at Keith’s belly, as much as he can see from here. If only Imbroglio had better lighting, or maybe if Shiro had better eyes, or maybe if both of those things were true… This is what he gets for having a mixed astigmatism like his Mom and Grandfather Namesake, instead of being simply nearsighted like his brother and Aunt Satomi. Ogling Keith would be so much easier… But at least Shiro’s here. At least he can appreciate _any_ kind of view.

Watching Keith knead his pudge and trying to ignore the Sahara-dryness of his own mouth, Shiro explains, “Keith’s my best friend. And I spent a year-and-a-half lying to him by omission. Going out of my way to keep him from finding out about something pretty big, then dropping it on him all at once without a warning. And I planned to talk to him after I took a nap, but…” With a sigh, he shakes his head. “Which part of this _isn’t_ obvious, Hunkules?”

The sheer overwhelming obviousness of everything feels like a ten-ton weight in the pit of Shiro’s chest. The accompanying guilt prickles and scratches along the insides of his lungs. His throat feels like it’s burning, and as much as he’d like a hug right now? When Hunk squeezes his shoulder, Shiro tenses and feels like he could start coughing again at any moment.

“So, give him a few days of space to cool off and adjust to you having abs now,” Hunk says as though it could ever possibly be this easy. “Keith won’t stay upset with you forever. When he’s calmed down a little, though? I say it’s time for you to suck it up and tell him how you feel.”

“Understatement of the century, dude,” Shiro huffs. “I should’ve told him before I even left—”

“Then why _didn’t_ you—”

“Are you seriously playing dumb with me about this? Why do you _think _I didn’t—”

“I think you’re being an idiot, if it’s the reason that I’m thinking—”

“Of _course_ it’s the reason that you’re thinking.”

Admitting this feels terrible enough. It’s worse that Shiro feels like he has lobsters scuttling around his chest, snapping their claws around his lungs. As though Shiro needed any further frustration in his burgeoning pile of emotional garbage, he spots a shock of purple hair rising from the table. Lotor hesitates a moment, apparently talking to Keith and Lance, then shakes out his ponytail. He slinks away from the table like a man on a mission who hasn’t entirely outgrown his childhood desire to be a debonair and dashing international man of mystery.

Groaning, Shiro edges away from Hunk so he can flop and put his back against the wall once more. Maybe it won’t provide him any _real_ security when Lotor tracks them down, but it’s easier to keep standing up like this. One less thing to worry about, and God, with the way his chest feels like it could split open from vibrating so hard? Shiro really needs that pale imitation of serenity.

“Yes, I _know_ that Keith is not that shallow,” he says, trying to ignore the oncoming storm of purple hair and unfathomable dramatics. “I know that, if he’d turned me down before, it wouldn’t have been because I weighed almost _three times_ as much as he did. And I feel guilty enough already for ever letting myself feel like there was _any_ possibility that he’d ever care about his significant other being fat—”

“Looks are not the most important part of dating people, Shiro!” The back of Hunk’s hand smacks into Shiro’s bicep. “They aren’t the most important part of _anything_, for that matter! After _everything_ we’ve been through? All the work you did? How the _Hell_ are you still not getting—”

“Not for nothing,” Shiro hisses, “but incoming drama prince. At my three o’clock.”

Hunk grumbles. “You really think you’re getting out of this—”

“I’m not trying to get out of any—”

“Talking about anything incoming like we’re done with this conversation about—”

“I didn’t say that!” He gasps and it’s like getting paper-cuts along the insides. Not even paper-cuts, but paper-gashes. Chest burning up from pit to collarbone, Shiro thumps his head against the wall. Doesn’t help him breathe any easier, or with any less pain. But Hunk is glaring at him and deserves an answer, so Shiro forces himself to say, “I’m not disagreeing with you, okay? I should have told him… Not telling him was stupid. So, _so _stupid… There aren’t any good reasons why I didn’t tell him that—”

“Why didn’t you tell what to whom?”

Storming up to Shiro’s other side, Lotor folds his arms over his chest in a way that begs people to take him seriously. He shakes his ponytail like a horse swatting flies, and his cowlick bounces in obvious agitation. Without a word, he squints at Shiro impatiently and screws up his mouth, all but outright screaming that he means business with his creative partner and most certainly isn’t pouting, how very dare anyone think to suggest such things.

Shiro can’t get his eyebrow to quirk the way he wants it. “Category is, ‘Impersonating your homophobic jerk twin brother’?”

“You are not amusing me at the moment, darling.” With an exhausted and ever-so-put-upon sigh, Lotor peers around Shiro. Somehow, he manages not to blush as he turns his eyes on Hunk. “What did Takashi fail to tell to whom?”

“Take a wild guess,” Hunk drawls. “It involves somebody short and energetic and in perpetual fanboy love with Dolly Parton.”

“_Ohhhhh_. Yet another round of stupid reasons why he hasn’t told Keith how he feels yet—”

“_He_ is standing right here, y’know… And _he_ can perfectly hear both of you, no matter what you think—”

“_He_ should have told Keith how he feels before we left for California. I have been saying this for months upon untold months—”

Shiro swallows a groan as he rubs at the bridge of his nose again. Trying to look at Lotor, he feels like his head is spinning. Or maybe like the restaurant is spinning while he’s too pinned down for anyone to move him. Each breath makes things worse. That heaviness—how can it possibly feel like Shiro has an anvil bearing down on his chest while he also feels something clawing up his insides and trying to bust out? And he’s still breathing—he’s keeping each breath long and even and measured, the way that he’s supposed to do, the way his different therapists have instructed him to do in the hopes of better managing his anxiety—so why does it feel like he has any army of gremlins slicing up the inside of his chest?

But since Shiro has two friends glaring at him and approximately zero answers for them, he rolls his eyes and tells them, “Your disapproval of my life choices has been noted, alright? I have noted this disapproval _several_ times over, for that matter. _Especially_ yours, Ballerina Barbie—”

“Yes, but you continue doing things that are not good for you,” Lotor points out primly. “So honestly, darling: what’s the point?”

“Especially since you never listen about things being stupid until _after_ you’ve already done them.” As if he’s worried over something—as if there’s anything worth worrying over, at the moment—Hunk reaches for Shiro’s shoulder again. Hesitates a moment before giving him a squeeze that’s firmer than it needs to be. “That’s all one of the things that makes you who you are, and we love you, but… Come on, man, we’re still gonna worry.”

“Barking up a potentially hopeless tree, my dear. He remains as terrible as ever at listening to any such reassurances—”

“Well, that just means I’ll need to let him know we care about him more often, doesn’t it? Because we _do_ care—”

“Naturally. However, you could save yourself the breath and spare yourself the stress headache. It’s an approximately Zethrid-sized stress headache, and about as ill-tempered as Takashi’s _beloved_. I assure you that you do _not_ want to deal with it—”

“Uh, dealing with stress headaches in the name of helping people is kinda like my _thing_? That, and baking. And making sure that everybody’s eating right. And finding all the best gossip—”

“All things at which you excel, my dear. My only point is that you deserve far better than shouldering the responsibility for—”

“If you _really_ want to point out something helpful,” Shiro cuts in—and almost immediately regrets it. “Because what you’re saying now is, like, the opposite of that, but… I mean, if you _really_ want to point out something that could actually help me, I’m…”

As soon as he says this, Shiro’s chest gets that feeling like there’s something going wrong with him. Like vines and tendrils slithering through his airways, curling around his lungs like a hangman’s noose made from a live boa constrictor. His heart races until he gasps for breath, and then it seems to stop. But when it starts back up, it’s pounding harder, faster. It stumbles to another stop and feels like it might not ever beat again, then right as panic starts clawing up the back of Shiro’s neck, it jerks back to life and flutters like it’s trying to make up for lost ground…

Watching Lotor go all soft and wide-eyed—as he knots his brow in obvious concern and pouts as though he feels utterly, completely helpless—Shiro wilts against the wall. If he could bury himself, he would. Anything to avoid getting looked at like that. Lotor’s making a face that he should never need to make, not least over someone who he cares about. Since Shiro started all of this, he needs to be the one to finish it. But words feel like they’re coming to him in illegible writing, or a language that he doesn’t really speak. Hunk’s thumb rubs up circles around his bicep, and Shiro almost jumps back. If he had any control over his limbs right now, he would. Because for no good reason, Hunk’s touch feels like he’s built up enough static electricity to kill a person.

Somehow, Shiro bites down the pain and gets a breath that counts for anything. Somehow, he makes it go deep and measuring that inhale steadies him. There’s a twist of nausea down in the pit of his stomach, but it’s not as awful as it could be. Between Lotor’s pouting and the glare that Hunk’s no doubt repressing, Shiro can’t keep dragging this out, he can’t let himself pull such a dick move with two of the people he cares most about in this entire world—

“What,” Shiro forces himself to say. “What does a heart attack feel like?”

Something inside of Shiro writhes in pain over how small and pathetic his voice sounds, now. It jumps up several notes from where it usually rests, quivering like a bowstring that’s about to snap. And it comes out sounding like Shiro’s vocal cords would much rather wither up and die in a shoe-box underneath his bed. It sounds like he can’t breathe, or like he’s trying to talk while being strangled, or Shiro has no idea what. Whatever it sounds like, though, it makes him want to curl up the shadows somewhere nobody will ever find him. It makes him want to hide because he’s ruining Hunk’s birthday more than the conversations at the table already did, and Lotor would creatively be better off if he could work on his own.

Whatever Shiro’s feeling, it makes him think of Keith. Of rubbing Keith’s belly in a moment of weakness. Of the way his heart writhed over the strawberry pink blush that flared across Keith’s cheeks. Of how much better Keith deserves from anybody who would ever claim to love him or to be his boyfriend. No, wait—his datemate, his significant other, not just his boyfriend because Keith’s bi—but thinking about that makes the pressure wracking Shiro’s chest feel that much worse—

Edging closer, Lotor holds up a hand. He hesitates until Shiro nods his permission, then rests the backs of his fingers against Shiro’s forehead. They should feel like icicles, with how Lotor’s hands usually are. But Shiro shudders from feeling like Lotor’s pressing hot pokers into his skin. Which makes no sense, but neither does anything else. Breathing isn’t a chore because it’s difficult. Shiro’s body does that for him without making him think. But each time he gasps for air—each time he manages to choke down anything—the feeling of scratching and clawing and scraping comes back. Starts up all over again as if nothing could ever stop it—

“Would you like me to go get your Xanax, darling?” Lotor frowns as though he’s trying to find the right English word for the Galra or Altean terms he’s truly thinking in. “If you feel your heart racing, then perhaps it is—”

“I _know_ what my panic attacks feel like, Barbie!” Shiro groans as his knees wobble, laden down with guilt on top of everything else they’re holding up. Guilt joins the tendrils strangling him from the inside out. It wraps itself around both lungs with a mind to crush them into a black hole and leave Shiro with nothing but a void and pain. “Lotor, seriously? If I were having a panic attack… How can you even hear me ask _something else entirely _and get, like—”

“_Shiro_. Breathe.” Hunk clamps his hand so tightly around Shiro’s shoulder, he’s probably going white-knuckled. “Look, I’m a chef, not a doctor, but… Heart attacks feel different for everybody, so? I dunno, tell us what you _are_ feeling? Maybe we can work from there.”

“I feel _cold_,” comes out of Shiro before he can think of anything else. He whines when Lotor pulls his hand away. He digs his back against the wall. But nothing helps and his mouth is on a roll: “_Everything_ feels cold. Like, I don’t know? Not like wearing a crop-top to the airport in freaking January. Or, ‘Oh, yeah, I lost weight, thus insulation, and now I’m perpetually twenty-seven shades of freezing.’ It’s more like, ‘Who slipped liquid nitrogen into my drink?’ Except not really since I’d just be _dead_ if that had happened—”

“_Focus_, Shiro.” Lotor keeps his voice low and even. Looks at Shiro without looking him in the eye. Thank God, that would be too uncomfortable to tolerate, right now. “Verbal effusiveness does not necessarily mean you aren’t having a heart attack, and time is of the essence, if you are. Tell us what you are feeling—”

“I’m feeling _cold_, okay? The way I _told _you!”

But Shiro forces himself to take a deep breath because Lotor’s putting in more effort than he should. He bites on the inside of his lip, which doesn’t make the stabbing sensation in his lungs feel any better. But it helps when another feeling sledgehammers into Shiro, when it kicks him in the stomach and hits as if he hasn’t worked so hard to build up a stronger core, one with musculature and tone, one that could withstand getting hit like that. His stomach lurches and something burns in the back of his throat. He coughs—it’s wet and deep, and all alone, and he muffles it behind his wrist, but that doesn’t stop his chest from aching—

And another bite helps Shiro get through saying, “I think I’m gonna be _sick_…”

Thank God Hunk came and hid himself right by the restrooms.

Thank God that he and Lotor actually work well together, despite Lotor’s self-admitted lifelong trouble at playing well with others. They’re lightning-quick about prying Shiro off the wall and shepherding him down the corridor to the men’s room. Despite the multiple stalls, Lotor flicks the lock shut as Hunk asks where Shiro thinks he wants to go.

Getting on his knees in here wouldn’t be too terrible. The immaculate tile floor gleams under the fluorescent overhead lights. But Shiro’s whole body feels like it’s on fire, now. His legs feel like jello. His chest and arms won’t stop shivering like he’s got electric shocks coursing through him. Everything feels like it’s a miracle that he’s still conscious. Moving away from Hunk at all takes too much effort. Leaves him gasping for breath, feeling like he didn’t warm up properly before doing his morning five miles.

As Shiro flops onto the sink—braces himself with corpse-stiff arms and knees that could give out—Lotor tells him, “You are _going_ to be alright, darling.”

“Yeah, I better be,” Shiro deadpans. He wishes that he’d faint or die or catch fire already, but since he isn’t, he lets himself have a bitter, humorless laugh. “I can’t die when I’m _this close_ to escaping the 27 Club Curse—”

“_Dude_,” Hunk squeaks. “Could you _be_ any more freaking _morbid_—”

“Anyway, you lose a bet with Lance and Ezor if I bite it in a men’s room, right?”

Shiro throws a hard smirk Lotor’s way. It digs deep into his face and Lotor doesn’t give him so much as a chuckle in return.

“I agree with Hunk,” Lotor says flatly. His eyes go dull as he puts his hands on his hips and tries to square his shoulders. “Being ill makes your sense of humor more morbid than usual and I, for one, do not appreciate it—”

Fair enough, but Shiro can’t respond to it. Hunk thwacks at him again—more gently than any of his half-hearted blows have been tonight—and _something_ in Shiro’s chest shakes loose.

The coughing pushes past Shiro’s resistance. Breaks down every wall he tried to put up and every shackle that he tried to put around this involuntary process and its metaphorical wrists. At first, it’s just one cough. One that hits so deeply and so hard that Shiro’s mind reels when nothing comes up out of him.

But his lungs do not content themselves with that single cough. Because of course they don’t. Because nothing can ever just go easily for Shiro.

Clamping his hands around the cold porcelain, Shiro stops fighting. Not that he has much of a choice, right now. Each time he manages to inhale, his lungs refuse to let it stick around. They flail and spasm like they’re being electrocuted. They bang against each other, against his heart, against his rib-cage. They convulse, kicking the air back up in deep, wet coughs that hurt more than anything else that Shiro’s ever felt.

Which makes no sense. Which only makes this process worse. Because there’s no explanation for the fire wracking Shiro’s body; there’s just the white-hot pain that threatens to drown everything. Coughing’s only meant to involve Shiro’s airways, last he checked. But each time he’s wracked with another fit, his whole chest throbs with agony. His elbows strain with the effort of keeping him up. His knees shudder, trying to give out and groaning in protest when Shiro refuses to let them.

He leans harder on his palms, on the sink—oh, thank God he isn’t fat anymore, he couldn’t deal with accidentally breaking this thing off the wall—which makes his elbows threaten to buckle instead. Thankfully, they don’t. For one brief, shining moment, the coughing dies down. Shiro’s lungs let him breathe, which almost takes the edge off the _calm before the storm_ nausea rollicking around his stomach.

But when Lotor whispers his name, it’s a smack upside the head. The coughing comes back, harder than ever. One cough. Two. Shiro manages to get his breath again, and silently, he prays that maybe, he’ll get lucky. Maybe this will be the end of it.

Instead, a third cough slams into him. A chorus of smaller ones follow. Something drags up the inside of Shiro’s throat. As he spits up in the sink, he can’t guess what the thing might be. Can’t get any ideas about anything. He doesn’t get the burning, salty, acid taste of vomit, but it’s a miracle that Shiro manages to notice.

At least the coughing dies down, once Shiro spits up. At least his chest stops aching every time he draws a breath and his head starts getting back to a more even keel. At least he manages to inhale deeply, evenly, and slowly—and the anxiety starts melting out of him. At least he’s alive, despite the funereal silence coming out of Hunk and Lotor, at the moment, and despite the way Shiro’s ears start buzzing with the need for _somebody_ to hurry up and say something, _anything_.

As he catches his breath, though, Shiro sees the reason for the silence: a five-petaled crimson flower, sitting right above the drain.

Groaning almost makes him start to cough again. When he doesn’t, Shiro allows himself to whine, “Oh, for the love of _God_…”

“I suppose we should consider ourselves fortunate in one respect?” Making a deep, discontented noise, Lotor leans against one of the other sinks. His tight expression would be gaping shock on anybody else, but nevertheless, he maintains composure as he flips his cowlick off his face. “Hanahaki disease is infinitely preferable to a heart attack—”

“Yeah, but for _fuck’s sakes_.” Hunk sighs as he wrings the water out of some paper towels. Proffering them at Shiro and locking his gaze on Shiro’s face, he says, “You know what this means, don’t you? You’ve _got_ to go talk to him already. _Please_, dude.”

“You’re _joking_, right?”

That’s as close as Shiro can get to a formality, right now. Hunk’s unimpressed glare says everything. Shiro wouldn’t even need to look at him to know the answer, either. As he wipes down his face, his skin crawls with the awareness of how Hunk is completely serious and probably unwilling to let this go. Fighting the impulse to sigh—it might temporarily satisfy him, but it could also lead to another round of coughing—Shiro tucks his white fringe behind his ear.

“Guys, come on,” he mutters. “You paid attention to middle school health class, right? To the part about Hanahaki and consent? And how you can’t use Hanahaki as leverage over somebody without it _violating_ their ability to freely _give_ consent?”

Lotor quirks his shoulders and looks at Shiro as if asking whether or not he’s meant to be impressed. “I went to an elite, hyper-conservative prep school that valued wealth and family legacy over actual merit,” he points out, drawling only half as much as he could do, if he set his mind to it. “Our health class lectures about Hanahaki disease involved lessons about having same-sex and/or gender Hanahaki flare-ups—even if they are not romantic in nature—is part of a Communist plot to undermine the integrity of Galran culture and destroy us from the inside out.”

“Jesus, _seriously_?” Hunk slouches against the wall opposite Lotor. In the mirror, Shiro can see the perplexed, concerned expression twisting up Hunk’s face. “God, I thought me and Lance got it bad when we had platonic Hanahaki over each other and everybody thought we were in love—”

“That was scarcely the worst of it,” Lotor says as though he’s commenting on the weather. He betrays himself by fidgeting with his ponytail, though. He curls his hair around his fingers in the way that almost always accompanies one of his own anxiety spirals. “One of the faculty’s most beloved lessons taught us that anyone of _pure_ Galran ancestry would surely never have romantic flare-ups of Hanahaki disease for someone whom _he or she_ does not intend to take as a _wife or husband_, respectively.”

That sneering cuts through the haze of shock that’s trying to settle into Shiro’s brain. Yanks him back into the moment because he has to remember why Lotor gets like this. It’s defensiveness of Narti and Acxa. Because the former is non-binary, while the latter is both transgender and a lesbian, and like Lotor himself, neither of them is purely Galra. Suffering through the health class lectures at their old prep school must have been horrible for them. Of course Lotor doesn’t plan on forgiving the people whom he blames for causing two of his best friends any pain.

“Anyway,” Hunk pipes up. “The part that I remember paying attention to in the Hanahaki talks? Is the part where doing nothing is a good way to slowly kill yourself—”

“I don’t _plan_ on doing nothing,” Shiro says and wishes that he had the energy to make it sound halfway convincing. “But Keith’s already mad at me, okay? I’m not going to literally die if I get one of those OTC medications from CVS, and give Keith space to keep cooling off, and then _don’t_ use this unexpected Hanahaki to manipulate him out of being rightfully mad at me.”

Gingerly, Lotor clears his throat. “If I may—”

“Don’t you always?”

“I merely wished to offer you the option to refuse.”

“_Please_ just spit it out already—”

“Considering that you have never before had a flare-up of Hanahaki disease?” Lotor’s eyes narrow, flashing with an unspoken threat to raise Hell if Shiro even dreams of dismissing him, right now. “You are being remarkably blasé for someone who thought that he was having a heart attack until he coughed up a fully formed azalea.”

“Is that what this is?” Shiro whips out his phone, tries to line up a passably decent shot of his flower.

Lotor sighs, with an audible roll of his eyes. “Yes, darling. That is an azalea. It is what Keith makes people sick with—”

“Yeah, I used to get those before he sucked it up and asked me out already.” Hunk’s tone almost manages to sound casual. Almost lets Shiro think that this conversation might go easily for any of them. “Seriously, though? Waiting is one thing, Shiro, but you cannot just ignore this. You need to talk to Keith—”

“And I _will_,” Shiro insists. Frowning at his phone’s screen, he tries to focus the camera better, tries to capture all the details of the leaves (slightly crumpled around the edges, as if somebody went at them with a crimping iron) to the long, ruby red stamens with the bloody-looking balls at their ends. “But in the meantime? I’d like it if Lotor could explain what he means about me being so blasé?”

“I mean that you are being incredibly flippant about the fact that you coughed up a fully formed flower on your _first_ round of Hanahaki coughing.” Lotor pauses and, knowing him, he considers his words, gives them impeccable care because this moment is important to him. “Admittedly? I do not have any specific _statistics_ on how this illness presents. Or the statistics on who coughs up entire flowers when or why, but—”

“I may not have had Hanahaki as many times as Keith has,” Hunk offers impatiently. “But I almost never cough up a whole flower like that.”

“Likewise, my flare-ups _always_ begin with petals.” Huffing, Lotor glares until he gets Shiro to look his way. “In fact, until my _fourth_ experience with Hanahaki disease? I _only _coughed up petals. Had Zethrid not coughed up a whole forget-me-not for Acxa where I could see her do it? I would have thought that whole flowers were one of those popular misconceptions from horridly overwrought fiction, not anything real.”

Although Shiro has a functional reply ready and waiting on his tongue, he bites it back for now. He takes a deep breath and turns Lotor’s confession over in his head. For want of something to do with his hands, he takes the wet paper towels to his face. Maybe it doesn’t help him to feel any better—any better grounded in what’s happening right now—but it feels nice enough, Shiro supposes. The water’s cool on his face and the repetitive, gentle scrubbing settles Shiro’s nerves.

True, he’s wiping off his concealer, which makes his heart sink because he doesn’t feel like reapplying it right now. But the rest of him feels cleaner, which in turn makes him feel less like something buried in a sick cat’s vomit. Based on how things have been going lately, that’s probably the best that Shiro’s gonna get, tonight.

Unfortunately, he can’t argue with any of the points his friends have made about this incident. It feels like getting handcuffed to a metaphysical St. Andrew’s Cross, but Shiro would lose any argument before it properly got started. Everything that Hunk and Lotor have said makes perfect sense, the same way that it makes sense for Shiro to have coughed up a red azalea. Who else would he get Hanahaki for but Keith? It’s always been Keith for him. No matter how powerfully he’s loved his exes, his friends, his family, and no matter how true those loves have been? Keith is the only one who’s ever gotten to Shiro quite so deeply.

In a way, it’s comforting. Having that bit of sense in all of this feels like having a life-preserver. Racketing from a maybe-heart-attack to staring at this flower has left Shiro reeling. His chest tingles like it’s empty, not informing him that he has something nestling around his lungs but shoving him face-first into the _absence_. The feeling that there _should_ be something there, and yet, there isn’t. If it’s strange that Shiro coughed up a full-formed flower on his first go, then he could stand to Google that when he gets home. He might do well to look up whether or not this _void_ feeling is a Hanahaki symptom, too. As long as he doesn’t end up down a WebMD rabbit-hole and armchair-diagnosing himself with ten different forms of cancer…

Shivering ever-so-slightly, Shiro makes himself look up at his reflection. He makes himself meet his own eye in the mirror instead of watching as Lotor moves to lean beside Hunk on the wall. He tries not to eavesdrop on their conversation, either. As much as he’d rather listen in—Lotor won’t be confessing to his own romantic feelings at a time like this, but it’s always fun to watch him work his magic through a flirt—Shiro needs to focus on centering himself.

Sighing softly, he pushes his white fringe off of his face. The dark circles beneath his eyes look heavier than usual, but that’s probably his imagination. Similarly, his face cannot possibly look more tightly drawn than it did this morning because why would it? As he rubs a makeup-free section of paper towel over his jawline and the apples of his cheeks, Shiro’s insides twist uncomfortably. Pressure threatens to build up again, teases him by pushing out against his ribs. Something heavy bears down on his chest and shoulders, but it doesn’t exactly feel like what he felt before he started coughing up. Close enough for jazz, but a bit on the light side.

God, he put himself through Hell to get the body that he wanted, and he still doesn’t deserve to be with Keith. Isn’t that just his luck?

“He had _best_ handle his Hanahaki responsibly.” Lotor’s voice snaps into Shiro’s emotional haze, cutting through everything with the sort of clarity that Shiro desperately needs right now. “Unless he wants to find himself _creatively divorced_—”

“I’m _going_ to handle things responsibly,” Shiro claps back, rolling his eyes with more affection than he wants to, at the moment. “I know that I make some pretty amazingly terrible decisions, sometimes? But I know how bad Hanahaki can get if you don’t take care of yourself.” He takes a deep breath, mostly to prove to himself that he can do it without coughing. “I promise that I won’t blow this off.”

“_Good_,” says Hunk. Despite his serious tone, his face is crestfallen again, practically a pout. “Remember, Shirogane: I know where you sleep. If you pretend that this doesn’t exist, I’ll let myself into your room while you’re at the gym and move everything around. Like, enough for you to notice? But not enough for you to know exactly what I did.”

“How perfectly _monstrous_, my dear,” Lotor says, eyes glimmering so much that Shiro can see it from here. “I _love_ it.”

Blushing, Hunk ducks his chin and scratches at the back of his neck. “I dunno if it’s that great, really? I mean, I just thought… That’d drive _me_ crazy, if anybody ever did it? And Shiro has a totally different sense of order and different needs in laying out his bedroom, but… Y’know?”

Supposing that, indeed, he does know what Hunk means, Lotor brushes his shoulder against Hunk’s bicep. “If nothing else about this situation serves as comfort? At least Hanahaki is quite treatable. So, our darling Takashi is not _literally_ dying.” Lotor’s lips purse up as if he can’t decide what to say or not.

But before Hunk can get a word in edgewise, Lotor goes on with, “This flare-up will likely be unpleasant, if Shiro is already hacking up full flowers? But Keith and I are living testaments to how easily one can survive a bout of Hanahaki.” He huffs, flashing Hunk a grin that wishes it looked casual and cool. “One of the few benefits to having a chaotic childhood, in his case, or a wildly unstable, abusive blood family in mine? One learns that one can find ways to thrive, even in the worst of circumstances. Even when one thinks that one might well be down and out for good, this time—”

“Oh, _I’ve_ got a morbid sense of humor?”

“Yes, Takashi, you absolutely do.” Lotor sniffs. “I am not making a joke out of what Keith and I have experienced. I am merely attempting to offer Hunk consolation. Because I know quite well that you will not be taken down by something so simple as Hanahaki disease.”

“That’s a little bit too morbid for me…” Hunk shrinks back against the wall as if he’s trying to escape. “Can we maybe get back to making Shiro agree that he’s going to take care of himself? And not let this get completely out of hand or anything?”

“I _won’t_. How many times do I need to promise that before you _listen_ to me?”

It probably won’t make them believe him any more, not when both of them are in some kind of _Mood_ with him. Still, Shiro folds his arms over his chest and turns to face his friends. Content that he won’t do any irreparable harm to the sink, he leans against the edge.

Looking them over, he can’t tell what’s going on with Hunk and Lotor. Neither of them looks upset, but neither of them looks exactly _happy_ either. They’re hovering close to each other’s sides, leaning in close as if they were flirting. Or the could’ve been conspiring. Or they simply could’ve been trying to keep their voices down because they wanted to give Shiro the illusion of space and privacy while he had a moment to himself. Pursing his lips, Shiro focuses more on Lotor. From the top of his purple-haired head to the soles of his immaculately-kept combat boots, everything about him seems tightly put together—except for the guilty-looking blush and the way that he can’t meet Shiro’s eyes.

Not content with staying in the dark, Shiro flat-out asks them, “What were you talking about?”

“Not about _you_,” Lotor drawls, even though he has to know that accusation is a bit silly. “We were simply discussing, well… Hanahaki. Our different experiences with it. Whether or not we are taking care of ourselves as much as we advise you to do… Certain things such as that—”

“Picking _irises_ on the _Yellow_ Brick Road?”

Shiro pointedly arches both eyebrows at Lotor. Tries to ignore the way that Hunk scrunches his face and gives up a befuddled little noise. Because he’s talking about Hunk, in a sense—but more than that, Shiro’s asking Lotor what his own lungs are doing. If he’s having another bout of Hanahaki over Hunk. Whether or not Hunk realizes what’s going on, this’ll be Lotor’s thirteenth round of hacking up yellow irises.

Lotor hugs himself like a pill-bug in its defensive curl. His cheeks flush dark enough to answer all of Shiro’s questions.

“Well, if I may paraphrase one of my favorite philosophers, Ballerina Barbie?” Shiro smirks, but puts some affection into it—a warm glimmer behind the eyes, a dash of fondness that he can’t completely help when Lotor gets like this—so that Lotor doesn’t take it too badly. “Perhaps you should’ve told him how you feel before we left for California.”

Wrinkling his nose, Lotor glowers like a kitten who’s just been put through bath-time. “Perhaps people ought to reconsider their notions that you are the sweet one in our partnership while I am the atrocious hellcat.” He scoffs, but can’t keep himself from smiling like Shiro really might be someone who he doesn’t want to lose. “You can play the innocent, darling, but rest assured: you truly are a skinny bitch. With my emphasis currently falling on the _latter_ half of that compound phrase.”

Shrugging, Shiro decides, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Take it however you like,” Lotor drawls, “so long as we can return to dinner. I’m hungry, and this restroom is getting emotionally claustrophobic.”


	7. Chapter 7

Life goes on—which honestly shouldn’t surprise Keith, not when he’s gotten used to this. Upsets happen, things go sideways, everything feels like it’s going to fall the Hell apart. But always, always, always, no matter how many times Keith tries to count things out: _life goes on_. It finds a way to maneuver through the bullshit, and it goes on.

Maybe it’s more confusing that everything settles into a routine that Keith knows intimately, as if Shiro never went to California. Except, of course, for subtle differences. They accumulate like storm-clouds, hovering at the edges of Keith’s periphery, letting him know that they exist but not what the fuck they mean, if anything.

The day after his return, Shiro gets up early, makes himself eggs for breakfast, and takes them with him to the gym. Apparently, his new process involves doing his cardio first, then eating, then the strength and resistance training. By the time he gets back, Keith’s put in a load of laundry and Shiro’s sweat reeks enough to overpower the reheated Pad Thai that Keith’s digging into while he reads. After a shower, Shiro finishes setting up his desktop—which came to the apartment by mail a couple days before he and Lotor got home—and works on editing Keith’s latest clip while Keith lounges on Shiro’s bed, wrapped up in his book and Shiro’s fleece _Star Trek_ blanket.

Exactly as before, they’re perfectly happy to be around each other and work on separate things, enjoying each other’s presence without needing to say a word. Even when Shiro spends his breaks doing push-ups and crunches instead of breaking out his old Gameboy Color, it feels like nothing’s really changed. Possibly like so much has changed that, cumulatively, everything has stayed the same. When Shiro does his so-called favorite pushups, the claps between each rep fall into a rhythm that’s, frankly, _better_ than Shiro’s old habit of grumbling and grousing at his _Pokémon_ games for not letting him catch the pocket-monster that he wanted or _Tetris_ game for giving him the wrong pieces.

As soon as he recognizes the warm, comfortable feeling that’s swimming over him, something cold and guilty twists around Keith’s chest. His internal jury is still out on whether or not he should cosign the major changes that Shiro’s made to his life, and God, what kind of best friend would he be if he decided to support this without giving it enough thought? If he rushed in too quickly and wound up enabling behaviors that aren’t actually good for Shiro in the long-run? But Keith can count off the reps of Shiro’s push-ups. He can predict when Shiro’s going to clap, and he gets used to the pattern, and so help Keith, if he’s in the wrong? Shiro’s push-ups don’t throw Keith off as badly as his video games used to do.

Yet, Keith wants to ask what happened at dinner last night. Some _incident_ must have happened between Shiro, Hunk, and Lotor. When they all got back to the table, they kept throwing each other particularly loaded glances. Then, Shiro and Hunk pointedly refuse to say anything, and their silence might as well scream, _“Do not speak of this thing that we’re keeping secrets because Shiro started it with losing weight and not talking to each other openly is a thing we do now.”_

Yet, life goes on. The days go on. Before Keith knows what’s going on, it’s been a week since Shiro and Lotor got back from California. He’s carrying plastic bags from Stop-N-Shop or Target with him everywhere as if he’s going out to walk a dog, so he can hack up any petals until this latest Hanahaki flare-up plays itself out. He’s always ready with a bag, or some napkins, plus a bottle of hand sanitizer because cleaning up his pneumo-flora never gets any less disgusting.

Before Keith knows which way is up, Shiro has his entire room unpacked again, from getting his clothes cleaned up and put away, to getting his bookshelves rearranged exactly how he likes them, to putting a new poster (Doctor Bashir and Garak from _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine_) on the wall, along with his _Faith_-era George Michael, his Emilie Autumn circa _Opheliac_, Sir Ian McKellen (because he was Shiro’s first celebrity crush and, on some level, Shiro isn’t over it), and his _“Hugh Jackman as Wolverine because Shiro doesn’t know whether he wants to get fucked by him or get a set of abs like that.”_

Before Keith has even decided that he can accept these changes after all. Shiro’s reclaimed the stuffed black lion plushie that he let Keith keep while he was at USC. Come morning, Keith expects Shiro to be either gone or heading out the door. Maybe, if Keith allows himself to sleep in late, he’ll catch Shiro as he’s returning from the gym—and this should feel weird as Hell because this is new behavior for him, as far as Keith’s concerned. Shiro might have built it up over a year-and-a-half, but Keith was expecting him to sleep in like always, to sign up for a gym membership and then never use it, and to be a nightmare in the morning until he’s had at least two cups of coffee.

He should hear Shiro talk about his gym routine and feel like they’ve fallen through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass. Following Shiro to the gym some mornings, Keith should watch him working out and wonder about whether or not he’s actually okay, or if he’s lying to himself about his well-being. He should watch Shiro doing push ups and think about how many reps he’s doing, not if Shiro could still do them with Keith lying on his back. He should watch Shiro lifting weights or pounding the treadmill as if it’s nothing and feel anxious, uncomprehending, befuddled, angry, or _something_ other than what he really feels.

Keith should watch this happening and feel _literally_ _anything_ other than hopelessly turned on.

Except that doesn’t happen. Sure, Keith feels _guilty_ for it, but every time these changes confront him, Keith can’t bring himself to argue with them. Having Shiro back makes everything okay, even when the sight of his new muscles moving underneath a tank-top inevitably leads to a round of Hanahaki coughing. Even when he has such an extensive list of things that he doesn’t eat anymore “outside of sometimes for a cheat day” and Hunk never stops scowling about it. Even when his post-gym stench makes Keith’s head spin with too many feelings that defy coherence (not least of which is confusion, because it’s probably eleven different kinds of weird, catching a whiff of Shiro’s sweat and wanting to fuck him face-first into the nearest flat surface).

Then again, maybe it helps that Keith _doesn’t_ put such restrictions on his diet anymore. Makes him feel like he’s better off, not needing to pretend he cares about such things because he’s accepted that they never mattered to him in the first place. Sure, Keith stocked up on all of Shiro’s old favorite kinds of macaroni and cheese, intent on making them for him because he could’ve found a way to burn spaghetti or blow up Pop-Tarts. But even using Dr. Iverson’s recipe, Keith can’t make Shiro’s favorite macaroni and cheese exactly as his godfather used to do for him and Ryou, and hey, if Shiro doesn’t want to eat the Kraft dinner or Velveeta? More for Keith.

Likewise, eating gives Keith something to do other than feeling sorry for himself or making things about himself unnecessarily. On Shiro’s second Friday back where he belongs, Keith _could_ spend his lunchtime moping around the employee break room at Ryner’s Books & Curiosities. He _could _sit back there with Pidge and Nyma, watching the two of them flirt over their packed-at-home lunches, feeling so lonely and romantically unsatisfied that he wishes he would just be sick instead. Or Keith could ask Pidge to cover for him while he takes a longer lunch than usual—after all the times he’s covered for her and Nyma while they’ve made out in a supply cabinet, Pidge owes him—and head over to Sal’s.

First of all, this saves him the trouble of making his own lunch. Not that Keith objects to doing the work like an adult, but it’s nice to spend extra time at the apartment. Gives Keith the chance to see Shiro before heading to his shift. He ends up hacking black rose petals into a bag once he gets down to his car, but God help him? Watching Shiro peel out of a sweaty tank-top—watching the muscles in his back flex as he stretched out, watching him rub his biceps and mumble something that Keith couldn’t make out for the life of him, even watching the way his abs move when he breathes—was absolutely worth it.

Then, going to Sal’s for lunch has the benefit of seeing Hunk. As Keith ambles into the diner, Hunk waves at him from behind the counter. He settles into one of his favorite booths, grateful that it’s actually open, and when Hunk sends Shay over, Keith puts in an order that they’re used to getting out of him: the chicken fingers appetizer, an order of the bottomless sweet potato fries, whichever lunch special Hunk’s most excited about today because Hunk is Good and Keith trusts his judgment, a super-sized double-chocolate milkshake with extra whipped cream on top, a double-brownie sundae for dessert, and a Coke.

Things would probably be better if Hunk would join him sooner, but this _is_ Hunk’s workplace and he _is_ in the middle of a shift. In the meantime, Keith could eat his food like a normal person, or he could do something far more fun. When Shay brings over his plate of chicken fingers and his basket of fries, Keith clicks over to his phone’s camera and sets it to record. He leans his phone against the napkin dispenser and hits record. Making a clip of himself eating lunch sounds like a treat for his subscribers _and_ for Keith himself.

Sure, he’ll need to have Shiro edit things together for him later, but it’s better than asking Allura. Besides, Keith can burn that bridge when they get to it. For now, he dunks his chicken fingers in the ketchup or the ranch sauce—or sometimes both—and chows down on them. Resting his cheek in his palm, he groans around a mouthful and just hopes that he doesn’t get hard in public. Hunk’s cooking is good enough for that, of course. But Keith has things to do today—

“My, my, my, Keith. I do hope that isn’t _all_ you’re eating.”

—Keith almost sighs in relief as that voice cuts into his thoughts. Even holding that back, he gives Lotor a small smile when he looks up from the table. It’s tight, and it takes effort for Keith to hold the expression, and his lips quiver from the strain of it—but on the other hand? There’s a switchblade edge to the smile that Lotor gives him, too. Flipping his cowlick off his face, he puts a hand on his hip as if he cannot believe that Keith would keep him waiting.

That kindles a warm feeling in Keith’s chest because this is refreshing and there’s comfort in its familiarity. No matter what all has changed around them, he and Lotor remain friends who sometimes struggle to get along by anybody’s standards but their own.

When Keith gnaws off another bit of chicken instead of saying something, Lotor huffs. “That looks like a truly insufficient lunch, darling,” he says, drawling as if it’s merely a formality, a way for him to keep up appearances when he would prefer not to. “I cannot imagine that you have put on so much weight by eating like a bird.”

“Most people wouldn’t say I’m skimping by eating five chicken fingers and one of Hunk’s milkshakes by myself,” Keith tells him with a shrug, not that he expects Lotor to listen, much less care. Budging over, he pats the seat by way of inviting Lotor to come sit down already before him standing around makes things between them awkward. “Anyway, I’ve already had one refill on my fries. And my _real_ lunch is coming.”

Lotor inhales sharply and can’t fight off a warm shudder. Or maybe he doesn’t want to hold it back. The fidgety way he rolls out his shoulders could mean either of those things, and there’s not much to read into when he angles himself toward Keith. Really, the strangest thing is the gift bag that he sets down on the table. It’s sunshine yellow with multicolored paper sticking out of the top and something doodled in black marker along the front. Maybe it’s a lion? Or maybe a giant dog with crazy hair? Keith can’t tell what Lotor meant to draw, but he guesses that it doesn’t matter.

Either way, his fries are infinitely more interesting than whatever Lotor thinks he’s doing with that bag. Keith swabs three of them around in the ketchup, and sighs contentedly as he sucks them down, as he inhales their perfect mix of crisp and soft, or tangy and salty and ever-so-slightly sweet. It would be a moment of perfection—if not for the way that Lotor whines as Keith licks the salt and grease off of his fingers.

In fairness, Keith would _kill_ to hear Shiro whine like that over watching him stuff his face. But Lotor, unfortunately for him, is not Shiro. He has his own charms, Keith guesses, but he isn’t Shiro and that’s what counts.

“I _knew_ that you had a glutton buried in there somewhere, darling,” Lotor tells him when he has another mouthful of fries and can’t argue with him saying this. Despite Keith trying to restrain himself and pull his reactions back into line, his cheeks flush hotter than Hunk’s oven, which makes Lotor snicker. “Oh, come on. I’ve looked at some of your more recent clips over the past few evenings—”

“I hope you _paid_ me for that—”

“Technically, _Zethrid_ paid for it, but fret not. You shall get your due financial recompense.” Lotor quirks his shoulders as if normal people talk about the semantics of paying for amateur porn videos over lunches with their friends. “She insisted that she owed me a gift for having missed my last birthday. I attempted to tell her otherwise because I’m simply happy to be home, but she would not relent. You know how Zethrid gets. I wanted to see what sort of show your subscribers have been getting as you’ve gained, since Shiro has spoken so highly of your clips—”

“You should’ve waited, if you wanted a real show.” Keith smirks at the perplexed, throaty little noise that Lotor makes for him. “Shiro’s uploading my new clip this afternoon. Or maybe he got to it after I left for work, this morning. It’s a much better show.”

“Not that I doubt your honesty, but…” Lotor whistles, low and impressed. “That would be a true feat on your part, darling. Because your previous clips have not disappointed in the slightest. Looking at them has been like watching a beautiful butterfly emerge from his kinky chrysalis of self-denial.”

“Good to know your compliments are still completely fucking whack-job.”

“I do not see what’s so whack-job about telling you that you look good and have a healthy appetite.” Lotor only pauses whatever he thinks he’s doing so he can order a strawberry-banana smoothie, a glass of orange juice, and Hunk’s salad special with additional grilled chicken. Once Shay’s gone back to the kitchen, Lotor turns his attention back to Keith. “In all honesty, darling? Is complimenting your belly or the way that you can eat _really_ any different from telling Lance that he has nice legs—”

“Yes. Because Lance is a scrawny noodle and his legs are toothpicks and you shouldn’t lie to people—”

“I agree completely, but…” A roll of the eyes and a shake of the head that, somehow, makes Lotor look like the Prince he would’ve been, if not for his family being deposed in a revolution, nearly a hundred years ago. “_Somebody_ might tell Lance that he has nice legs. They_ are_ quite long, after all.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t really count for much.” Dimly, Keith wonders if he should turn off his camera. But instead of doing so, he rips off another piece of chicken finger and stirs it through the ranch. “If Lance ever worked out—or if he let himself put on weight instead—then okay, yeah, I could see that. He would have a _great _set of legs. Toned or chunky, regardless of how he got there? For sure, his legs would look _really_ hot if he’d put in a little bit of effort.”

Which feels like it should be building up to a better conclusion. But as Keith grabs up more of his fries, all that he has to say for himself is, “Lance having the potential to have great legs doesn’t mean that he has them right now, here, in the present moment.”

“Oh, believe me, darling: I am well aware of this fact.”

Snickering, Lotor smirks like the spider inviting the fly into his parlor. He pauses for long enough that Keith itches to interrupt—or to shove more fries past his teeth, as the case is. If Lotor’s arched eyebrow gives him more motivation to keep eating, then that’s perfectly fine with Keith. He’d be more at ease with this if he knew _why_ Lotor insists on staring down at his lap, or if he knew what it means when Lotor makes those pensive little _hmmm_’s or allows himself to chuckle. But asking Lotor sounds like too much effort, and a waste of time that Keith could instead invest in eating.

Shay brings Lotor his smoothie and his drink before he finally deigns to tell Keith, “Judging from how your shirt fits on that delightfully growing belly? I would say that _you_ have also gotten intimately acquainted with the difference between potential and reality.”

Puffing up around another four sweet potato fries, Keith’s cheeks flush hot again because of course they do. He rolls his eyes and squirms as he tugs his t-shirt’s hem down over his pudge. This is a losing battle before he even starts. He’s had this Carrie Underwood shirt since before he started gaining weight. While it was loose on him when he was skinny, it clings to his body like a wet-suit, now. Regardless, it’s one of his better-fitting shirts, and thus, one of the few that he can wear to work. When he gets back from this break, however, Keith will probably be pushing the limits of both the fabric and the workplace dress code.

Before lunch, the situation wasn’t quite so bad. Keith’s pudge strained the fabric and the hems, pushing out against a container that he truly doesn’t fit in anymore—but he could still keep the hem down by the waistband of his jeans. True, the shirt emphasized the curves around his middle. Yes, it rode up enough to expose a sliver of his pale stomach. But as he’s been chowing down, his belly’s bloated, and expanded, and put even more pressure on the shirt. When it protests by sliding up on him again, he taps at his pudge; he can fit three fingers on his skin before finding the spot where the hem hits him now. This makes him blush almost as much as Lotor cutting into his thoughts with a chuckle.

“Oh, dear,” he drawls. “I do hope that I didn’t catch you off your guard too terribly—”

“You _didn’t_, it’s just…” Keith scrunches up his face and huffs. “I usually don’t assess the damage to my clothing until _after_ I’m done eating. Y’know, not unless I pop a button off or something.”

“That must be a truly wonderful sight for whoever has the privilege.” A warm sigh, and then Lotor just _needs_ to tack on, “Do you still have those denim hot-pants that you used to be so fond of? If you could even get them up your thighs anymore, then I scarcely imagine that they could contain you for too long. You would look _delightful_ in such a state… Sitting on your bed with your shorts split wide open, practically painted onto all of that soft, warm pudge…”

Sure, Lotor says that affectionately and with an honest smile. There’s no judgment in his voice and more appreciation than Keith can ever remember hearing come his way from Lotor. But just when he thought that he could rein himself back in, Keith finds himself blushing all over again, probably looking like an increasingly chubby tomato. He can’t even get his mind around the words to tell Lotor that his latest clip features him doing something similar with the shorts in question. He just shoves his last bit of chicken finger into his mouth because, first of all, it takes his mind off of Lotor and his lack of boundaries.

More importantly, however? Keith isn’t letting Shiro’s ex-turned-creative-partner dissuade him from something that he enjoys. Especially when Lotor isn’t trying to do that, so giving up would only serve to hurt them both.

“Really, though, Keith. The way that you used to go at cheeseburgers that would have made lesser men run screaming? It was a thing of beauty to behold—but the sight has gotten even better, now that you have some extra pounds to go with it. They suit you so much better than being skinny ever did.” Wistfully, he sighs. “Shiro is an impossibly lucky man, even if he doesn’t realize it as of yet.”

“We’re in _public_,” Keith points out. “Also? You’re a self-admitted _chubby chaser_. So, forgive me if I call your opinion on this _biased_.”

“Why would I do that when there is nothing to forgive? My opinions on everything _are_ biased, the same as yours or anybody else’s.” This could all too easily turn into one of Lotor’s pseudo-intellectual misappropriations of theories he doesn’t really care about, or one of his half-baked defenses of his own position that involve spectacularly failing to listen to anybody else’s points. Instead, he leans in conspiratorially and adds, “Besides, darling? I actively relish in the specific bias that you speak of. It is one of the things that makes me happiest—”

“We are still in public—”

“As though you haven’t already considered torturing your beloved at an all-you-can-eat buffet.” Smirking like the cat who got the cream, Lotor waggles both eyebrows. His grin gets even more unbearable as Keith sinks back against the booth, cheeks burning.

But never one to get deterred when he’s set his mind to something, Lotor goes on, “As though you haven’t given thought to what it might be like… Taking Shiro to the Biggerson’s a few towns over…”

Keith’s lips screw up into a pout. As he tries to keep his breathing even, he curls one hand into a fist. Grinds his thumb along his index finger because that physical pressure feels like an emotional release valve. And God, the mere idea of taking Shiro out to a buffet makes him feel like he could explode into another coughing fit.

“You could go there wearing something _sinfully_ tight—which I feel should go without saying because you, Keith, are not an idiot. After all, you _do_ want Shiro to look at you in that way he does, and you will _want_ the attention of those other patrons…”

Vaguely, Keith recognizes the compliment and allows himself a momentary swell of pride. But Lotor keeps on talking, and God, when he decides to have a point about something… Keith holds back on a sigh and reaches for his milkshake. Drowning what he’s feeling in that smooth, cold rush of chocolate sounds like the best plan for everybody. Lips clinging to the straw, he sucks so deeply that he pulls his tummy back as well, and then he nearly chokes.

When he lets up on that drink, he gasps for breath and his stomach surges out back into place. It flops, jiggles, groans internally about how the milkshake settles. Lotor chuckles again and drops his hands to the table. Keith should probably keep an eye on those, but before he can focus enough on that would-be mission—

“Of course, you mustn’t wear anything so uncomfortable that you cannot allow yourself to eat with pure abandonment,” Lotor says as though he’s offering advice on how to fix a busted table. How he can maintain composure like this—how he can sit there so casually while Keith’s face will not cool down and he’s got a rush of heat and _want_ and _fuck_ twisting through the pit of his stomach—Keith can’t even begin to fathom the way that Lotor’s mind works, or how he can let himself do things like this.

All he knows is that he sinks further back into the seat and rubs his thighs against each other, as if this might actually let him hide from anybody. As if he can protect himself from Lotor’s kinky scrutiny by reminding himself that his thighs touch each other now, and that they’ve really gotten pretty chunky. The jiggle is soothing in its way, he guesses, as is the sound of denim scraping against denim. But neither of those things takes away the feeling like Lotor has Keith underneath a magnifying glass. Like he’s zeroing in on everything that he can find, and like he can see things on Keith’s body that Keith might not have even noticed yet.

That thought makes Keith suck down another mouthful of his milkshake. Which continues to be unhelpful, just like slouching makes Keith’s belly edge further out into his lap and no doubt gives Lotor more to work with. But fuck it, Keith _likes_ his milkshake, and watching the mixture go down and down in his glass is something easier to focus on. Something that doesn’t make Keith’s heart race in ways that normally reserve themselves for thoughts of Shiro.

Still unbothered by anything that strikes Keith as a big deal, Lotor whispers, “Imagine the way that our dear Takashi would blush from simply walking into the restaurant with you. Of course, he_ might_ have gotten even redder if he hadn’t insisted on desecrating his body by losing weight. A beautiful guy of ample size entering an all-you-can-eat buffet will _always_ attract the sort of attention that he hated getting. Doing it with someone who is getting quite plump and round himself would, no doubt, make even more people stare at the both of you. They might hiss amongst themselves about how it’s lucky that they’ve already eaten because, between you and Shiro at his biggest? The buffet would likely never stand a chance—”

Keith whines over top of whatever Lotor’s saying. He hunches his shoulders and tries to think of something else. Tries not to imagine the rows upon rows of Biggerson’s patrons focusing on him so intently that he can’t pretend they’re looking anywhere else. His belly sucks in without waiting for his permission, but he’s too stuffed and bloated to _really_ pull it back. The chub’s still there, still pooching out against his thighs—and God, if he went to Biggerson’s with Shiro? If he were wearing something even _tighter_, one of the shirts that Pidge doesn’t let him wear to work anymore when they have a shift together (which is almost every shift they have) because she gets secondhand uncomfortable from looking at him when he does?

_Shiro wouldn’t even _**_need_**_ to be fat again_, Keith muses as he hits the bottom of his glass. As he clears out the milkshake-dregs, the slurping noises jerk him around, back to more coherent thoughts, and as he refills his glass from the metal backup cup, he can’t stop himself from thinking, _He’s beautiful exactly as he is, and God, maybe I wanna have the gawkers’ spotlight to myself—_

“But perhaps you would like this misadventure _more_ now that Shiro has the abs he’s always wanted.”

Lotor purrs when he says this and Keith’s cheeks flush hotter still. He’s gotta be wearing a smirk like he just won something, but for the life of him, Keith can’t look at Lotor to confirm. Even thinking about that makes him wriggle in the seat, makes his insides twist with how much more he wants to hear from Lotor—and from how much he wishes that Shiro were sweet-talking him like this instead. Even thinking about that sends the familiar Hanahaki prelude chill jolting through his body. Gives him that equally well-known heavy feeling, as if he has an elephant sitting on his fucking chest.

Jesus Christ, he needs to get it together. As Keith reaches for his Target bag of flower petals, he tries to quiet all his thoughts that are getting increasingly removed from reality. There’s no way that Lotor can actually read his mind, and letting the asshole get to him like this makes Keith’s skin crawl even more than hearing Lotor pick apart what gets him off as though it’s his right to do so. As though Keith invited him into his psychosexual mind or his kinky impulses or anything else. Whatever’s going on between them—whatever Lotor thinks he means by it or doesn’t—Lotor is making lucky guesses and that’s it. He is riling Keith up and Keith _does not_ need to let him win.

“Ooooh, _darling_,” Lotor says as though he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. “Shall I take that as an affirmative reaction?”

“Take it however you want,” Keith bites out, putting his lips back around the straw.

“There’s truly no need to show that temper, you know. I don’t say any of this from a place of judgment or condemnation. Jealousy, perhaps, since I would _love_ to have such an opportunity, but…” Lotor makes a throaty little noise that’s like the vocal equivalent of a shrug. “For the moment? I am merely making conversation about some things that you might or might not want to do with Shiro…”

_God, you have no idea_, Keith keeps to himself because it isn’t helpful. He’s almost relieved when Lotor picks up where he left off:

“I can only imagine what might sort of reactions you might get out of going to the buffet with him now.” Lotor sighs in a way that sounds far too contented, considering the discussion. Flipping his cowlick off his face, he tells Keith, “_Two_ big boys going to the buffet is certainly worth staring at—but for you and Shiro to do this, now that he has abs? The other patrons would see this unreasonably tall slab of USDA prime beef coming through the door with a chubby kitten who would be petite if he could rein in his appetite or count calories to save his life.”

Something hot and slippery coils tight around Keith’s lungs. Curling both hands around the metal milkshake cup gives him a small chill, a little bit of relief. But there nowhere near enough to truly help him. The fire’s still raging inside his chest, roiling around his stomach, refusing to let him draw a breath without feeling like he could be sick if he breathes in too deeply or squirms in the exact wrong way.

“I doubt that anyone would _say_ anything where you could hear them do it. That would be impolite and offend their sensibilities nearly as much as whatever skin-tight outfit you decided to squeeze yourself into before dragging Shiro out. But certainly, they would be thinking that you have no business whatsoever in being with Shiro. Not looking how you do, these days.”

Lotor hums pensively and bats his boot at Keith’s ankle again. “Of course, this is perfectly ridiculous because you are _gorgeous_, but small-minded people may never appreciated that and it is _their_ loss, not yours. Besides…” He smiles and Keith can’t tell whether Lotor means it in a friendly way or not. “Plenty of people who are _not_ so closed off to possibilities? Or so limited in their thinking, due to preconceived notions about the relative value of different types of bodies? They can look at you and see that you are beautiful. Even if they might not see that? Then they will understand, instead, that Shiro’s love for you is none of their business to question.”

It might be worth thanking Lotor for the compliment. Maybe Keith should suck it up and try to do so. At the very least, a _“thank you”_ would be polite. The sort of thing that normal friends would do for each other during normal conversations.

But Keith’s thoughts are swirling around his head—humid, hot, and heavy, all muddled up in each other, moving too quickly for Keith to catch them, leaving him with the feeling that he’s trying to swim through molasses just to think about anything—and he can’t get his head around the words. Scrubbing his hands up and down his cheeks, he _tries_ to push through the haze that he’s making for himself. He wiggles his hips just to make his belly jiggle. He isn’t full enough to start getting any pangs yet, but feeling it wobble like this manages to anchor Keith to _something_, anything, about this present moment.

He doesn’t get himself back together before Lotor decides to plow ahead: “Regardless of what anybody’s thinking, though? The other patrons would scarcely be able to take their eyes off of you—especially once you get started _eating_.”

As if Keith hasn’t eaten anything today, his stomach growls. It must not be as powerful as it feels, because Lotor doesn’t seem to notice. But whatever the truth is, Keith slumps further onto the table, resting his his forearms and letting his head hang. His bangs give him a cloak, but probably don’t conceal his blush enough. The feeling like he’s genuinely hungry gnaws all up and down his insides, insistently reminding him that _something_ in him thinks he needs to eat more than he already has. Which might not be a bad idea, but Keith doesn’t get the chance to act before Lotor tells him:

“Based on the appetite you had before, and based on what I have seen since coming home? You could get close to cleaning the buffet out of everything. The first few plates wouldn’t even faze you. They might get you started, but even if you took the biggest plates that Biggerson’s will give you? Even if you load them down with all of your favorite indulgences?” A hum that wishes it were pensive, but comes off sounding more intrigued than anything. “I don’t think you’d start to feel _anything_ until you hit plate five or six. Maybe even seven—”

“Oh my _God_,” Keith groans, thumping his palm against the table and trying not to think about how great this idea sounds. “Can you just get to your freaking _point_ already.”

“Oh, I don’t really have a _point_ as such…” He trails off too pointedly for Keith to trust it, and with a chuckle that takes fucking sandpaper to Keith’s nerves, he bats one of his feet into Keith’s ankle. “I am merely speculating about different ideas that you and Shiro might find entertaining… Perhaps, ideas that you could use to make him admit how he feels after all this time—”

“Wait, _really_?” It bursts out of Keith before he can think to stop it. He snaps to attention, almost sitting up straight. “Lotor, don’t fucking play with me about this, okay? Or tease me. And don’t jerk me around, either. Are you being serious, or are you—”

Lotor groans. “Why on earth would I jerk you around when I want the two of you to be together almost as much as you do?”

“Fuck it, I don’t _know_?” Admitting this makes Keith whine, and another swig of milkshake does nothing to conceal that. But his mouth has its own ideas and keeps babbling once he’s swallowed, “Because you’re bored and I’m convenient? Because you’re thinking aloud but haven’t really thought about it? Because you’re talking out your ass, and making things up like this is some brainstorming session for the screenplay, and you didn’t _mean_ to get me going, but you did and now it’s like you’re—”

When Lotor cuts Keith off with a heavy sigh, it’s serious and sober. He goes quiet until Keith looks over at him, turns to see the long-suffering, tired expression that Lotor’s giving him. If not for the sympathetic gleam behind his eyes—and if not for _knowing_ that Lotor isn’t the jerk he can come off as and sometimes lets people believe is really him—Keith might feel incredibly condescended to.

“In fairness to you, Keith? I did intend that comment mostly as our usual, teasing back-and-forth,” Lotor says, losing all the playfulness that his voice has had so far. “_However_, I had no ill will or malicious intent behind it. Certainly, I had no desire to emotionally inflame you over nothing. Regardless of our history, I _do_ consider you a friend, I want you to be happy, and I want for you and Shiro to be together. It would be good for both of you, as well as ameliorating a great deal of stress that your unresolved romantic tension causes for the rest of us—”

“So, the cheers to our romantic and sexual fulfillment thing wasn’t you just being all glib and full of shit?”

Lotor sniffs, almost offended. “Decidedly not. I genuinely wish for you and Shiro to sort things out and just be together already.”

“Okay, uh… Thanks for your support, I think?”

“As for the actual idea that I suggested…” He pauses for a moment, giving up a pensive hum and considering how to phrase whatever’s on his mind. “I have not given it much in-depth consideration because I am no longer dating Shiro and this does not seem like the kind of activity that Hunk would find appealing—”

“I don’t know? You’re probably right, but you never know until you—”

“That being said?” Lotor rolls his eyes without any real energy behind it and quirks his shoulders. “If you mean to apply any of my suggestions to real life? I think that the idea has merit. Considering the _Shiro Factor_ of everything, taking him to a buffet and tormenting him might not work _quite _as well as you’d like? But I do think that he would enjoy it and as you were saying?” A small smile, but it’s genuine. Warm and supportive in a way that Lotor almost never shows to anyone but Shiro and the Fab Four Gal Pals. “It never hurts to try.”

Now that they’ve cleared things up, Keith lets himself slouch back onto the table. He combs his fingers through his hair, pushing his bangs off of his forehead with a sigh. Maybe he shouldn’t be giving what Lotor’s told him so much thought. Lotor threw it out there without any real consideration, so maybe Keith should put the idea down and leave it alone.

Still, something about what Lotor said—something about his immodest proposal, all wrapped up in notions of taking Shiro out to a buffet and teasing him with a public stuffing session—it all sounds so… _fun_. It sounds like the sort of thing that Shiro would never admit to enjoying because he keeps himself too tightly wound for that. Because he thinks that he can make himself stop having kinks by running upstairs to Ryou and begging to be shamed for them. It’s probably worse than ever, now that he’s slimmed down and gotten abs. He doesn’t feel like he’s allowed to be interested in the things he likes because they involve fat bodies being sexy, and Shiro won’t want to admit that a trip to the buffet sounds like foreplay to him.

God, though, with the way that Shiro watched while they were shooting Keith’s most recent clip? With how he’s looked while editing it? That slightly slack-jawed expression that he slips into when he doesn’t pay attention to his face, and the way that he glues his eyes to the screen as if the rest of the world could go up in flames and he wouldn’t even notice? Keith might be reading too much into things, but based on all the years upon years of evidence? He doubts it. Perhaps Lotor only meant to tease him, but there is so much potential in this idea of taking Shiro on a stuffing= date to a buffet… There are so many things that could go right, because Keith took a chance, he took a risk, and he took Lotor’s playfully flippant suggestion as an actual idea… There are so many things that Shiro doesn’t want to admit he’s into, and Keith could drag them out into the open by doing something that he enjoys doing anyway…

There is a golden brown hand with spindly, spider-leg fingers reaching for Keith’s basket of sweet potato fries.

Groaning, Keith slaps the back of Lotor’s wrist. “_No_,” he snaps and tugs the basket out of Lotor’s reach. “These are mine. Get your own.”

Lotor whines as if Acxa’s refused to let him keep a unicorn in the backyard. “But they taste _better _when you take them from someone else—”

“Oh, behave,” Hunk’s voice drawls above them.

When Keith looks up, Hunk stands there with a tray and an affectionate smirk. As he dishes things out, he sets down more than Keith and Lotor ordered. Sure, Lotor gets his salad and Keith’s mouth waters as Hunk slides him a plate with another round of chicken fingers (plus more ranch sauce because that’s necessary) and a heap of gooey baked mac and cheese. But there’s also a plate with a turkey BLT and Hunk brought over _two_ baskets of the sweet potato fries. He hands one of them over to Keith—“I kinda thought you might be getting ready for a refill,” he explains with an _aww, shucks_ shrug, bashful as ever about his intuition and his generosity—and he slides the other to Lotor.

You’d think that this would make Lotor happy, but instead, he pouts at the fries. “Did you get these for yourself, my dear?”

Putting aside his tray, Hunk quirks his shoulders again without really answering the question. As he settles into the seat opposite them, he supposes, “We can share them, if you want? But… Y’know, they taste better when you take them from somebody, right?”

“_Somebody_ meaning, ‘Formerly Shiro but he doesn’t really eat them anymore. Sometimes Zethrid or Allura because they usually don’t mind sharing. Definitely Lance and Keith because it annoys them to no end and it amuses me to vex them in this manner. But never, _ever_ Ryou because I may not be dating his brother anymore, but I’m still quite certain that he hates me for some inscrutable reason that likely makes no sense to anyone but him or Shiro.’” Lotor sniffs as though he can’t believe any of his convoluted thought processes require explanation. “I would prefer not to exacerbate anything that involves potentially being hated?”

For a moment, Hunk appears to consider this—but then he tells Lotor, “Well, I’m not Ryou, I don’t hate you, and I won’t eat all of them anyway because Sal put too many in the basket. Please, share them with me.”

“Yeah, go on, Prince Fuckhead,” Keith deadpans, dunking one of his own fries in the ketchup. “It’ll be almost as good as kissing—_hey_!”

Keith cringes as Lotor kicks his leg. As the initial rush of pain subsides, though, he shakes out his hair and helps himself to a huge spoonful of the mac and cheese because he will not let Lotor prevent him from enjoying lunch. Thankfully, the food draws Keith back into the moment and back to something that he _wants_ to deal with. Hunk’s worked hard on perfecting this specialty lately, and the effort that he’s put in shows. Everything from the gleam of the thick, homemade, mixed cheese sauce to the perfect crumbled crust that sits atop the noodles… From the heady, homespun smell that makes Keith salivate like no one’s business, to the savory taste that makes Keith moan as it fills his mouth… God, Hunk is a fucking genius in the kitchen, and his food always tastes like the love that he puts into making it.

Granted, Hunk put so much effort into perfecting his baked mac and cheese because he assumed that Shiro might like to have it when he got back from California—but thinking about that might sour Keith’s appetite worse than any stunt that Lotor could ever pull. Maybe Shiro isn’t trying to get a body like Hugh Jackman had in his _X-Men_ movie heyday anymore, but people who have abs like Shiro’s generally do not eat baked macaroni and cheese, no matter how much they love the stuff. Resting his cheek in one palm again, Keith digs up another spoonful, and a bigger one. If Shiro’s never going to let himself appreciate what Hunk tried to do for him, then fine. Keith will have to love Hunk’s food enough for both of them.

Fortunately, Hunk’s intuition—or maybe just his curiosity—keeps Keith from dwelling too much on these utterly miserable possibilities. As always, he paces himself about digging into his sandwich. In between bites, he furrows his brow at the gift-bag that Lotor put on the table earlier. Could be that Hunk’s simply trying to figure out what the drawing is supposed to be.

But then Hunk goes and asks, “So, uh… Is there a party that I didn’t get invited to?”

“Wait, what?” Lotor splutters, and barely chokes down a forkful of salad. It takes him a moment of coughing behind one hand to get settled down again. But once he’s good to go, Lotor says, “I beg your pardon? Because I don’t… It’s not that you’ve done anything wrong, of course not, I don’t think that you meant anything or that you would have meant to, but then I also I don’t… What exactly were you trying—”

“He’s asking you what the bag thinks it is when it’s at home, Prince Loser,” Keith drawls. “Because if that’s a new purse you’re using? Then okay, sure, but it looks like a present for somebody. And if it _is_ a purse, then why are you putting it on the table. You were not raised in a fucking _barn_.”

“Obviously not, or I would have been better off,” Lotor sneers. “I realize that you have not met my parents, Keith. But Sincline and I would have had our lives infinitely improved, had we been raised by wolves, or cows, or wallabies. A giant squid might have made a better parent—”

“And I would know _absolutely nothing_ about shitty parent-child relationships, of course.” A bitter, humorless laugh bubbles up inside of him and Keith can’t keep down. Not that he really tries to hold it back, but putting in the effort likely wouldn’t help. Besides, it’s only fair. If Lotor’s allowed to sneer, then Keith’s allowed to give him some disdain right back. “Are you gonna tell Hunk about what’s in the bag or what? You aren’t carrying a pipe-bomb in it, are you?”

“Do I _look_ like I know how to build a pipe-bomb?”

“I dunno. There isn’t exactly a single _type_ of person who knows how to build a pipe-bomb. You could’ve looked it up for a screenplay idea, or a play that you were in—”

“I do not have a _pipe-bomb_ in this bag, Keith. Stop being ridiculous—or at least be more interesting about it.” Although Lotor rolls his eyes, he softens up like melted butter when he looks back to Hunk. A candy apple red blush flares up on his cheeks. Yeah, it recedes pretty quickly, but that only leaves Lotor looking sugar pink and like he’s fighting himself not to run for the hills. “There isn’t… I didn’t mean to imply anything, or make you think that… There isn’t anything about this, no expectations of anything, I mean, and I know that it has been a week already—I didn’t _forget_? I wanted to bring this sooner, but there was unpacking to do, and…”

With a huff and a shake of his head, Keith gets down a sip of Coke. Jesus, so much for composure. Watching Lotor now is just _pathetic_. It’s like watching a baby deer learn how to walk. Except it has a broken leg, and the ice from the previous winter hasn’t entirely melted yet, and the poor little fawn is falling all over everything, and then a witch comes along and turns its legs into tentacles that the fawn has no idea how to use, and then the baby deer goes hungry because it can’t fucking walk.

Which is to say: watching Lotor attempt to flirt at Hunk is _sad_.

Finally, Lotor takes a deep breath. He drags a sigh up from his bone marrow, and he manages to say, “The bag is a gift for you, my dear. I had rather intended to give it to you _last _week—not at your actual birthday party, because selfishly? I wanted to have your undivided attention. But I meant to bring it by the day after. Except then, there was unpacking to be done, and laundry because I am not so lucky as Shiro and the ladies made me do it for myself—fairly so, but inconvenient nevertheless. Then, I thought that I lost some pieces of the gift and was distraught, but then Zethrid found them, and then I just…”

Ducking his chin, Lotor blushes again. Makes himself look like he’s in elementary school and trying to give a Valentine to the boy he likes. Sliding the bag across the table to Hunk, he mutters, “You don’t need to pretend, if you don’t like any of it… Honestly, it isn’t much, but…” A quirk of the shoulders, and Lotor doesn’t pull his gaze back up. It’s like he’s enraptured by his salad, like his mess of vegetables and chicken will not let him go. “I wanted to get you something… And I kept finding things in California that made me think of you, so…”

Biting back his impulse to sigh, Keith reaches for his phone and ends its recording session. For one thing, his battery is running on the lower end and he doesn’t want to think about how big the video file has already gotten. For another, though, and more importantly? Hunk and Lotor’s current conversation is not Keith’s business to record or not. If they opened the door and invited him in, then sure, it would be alright.

As it stands, though, Lotor looks like he’s trying to escape into the booth, and Hunk squirms like he’s got an itch that he can’t scratch.

Lotor may not let himself appreciate it, but on the other side of the booth, Hunk is blushing like he’s got fireworks going off underneath his cheeks. As he wipes off his hands and takes the bag, his eyes nearly bug out of his head and his lips purse so tightly that Keith almost loses track of them. It’s a cute look, and honestly, Lotor is missing out by not taking in the sight. But hey, Keith can take in the view enough for both of them, just like he’s doing with himself and Shiro and the macaroni.

First thing that sticks out as Hunk begins unpacking things: Lotor has no idea how to wrap a present. He made the tissue paper that peeks out of the bag look artfully tousled, but when Hunk reaches into the bag, he frowns. He pulls out a wad of balled up paper that has nothing in it, and then another. On the third go, he finally finds a gift, but the little key-chain nearly gets lost among the tissues.

Holding that gift up to the light, Hunk blinks at the charm dangling off the key-ring: a cartoon golden retriever that might’ve come straight out of 1974. It’s stretching out and smiling at the viewer, sticking its butt up in the air in the way that Keith’s been told is a dog’s way of saying, _“Play with me.”_

“I _really_ hope you let Shiro handle the packing when you sent stuff back from California,” Keith teases gently, nudging his shoulder into Lotor’s so the idiot can’t get too lost in his own thoughts or something. He has his hands folded on the table—isn’t even paying attention to his smoothie or his lunch—which is concerning behavior, regardless of their history together. “Like, A for effort, Prince Loser, but… Shiro would’ve packed things better. Packing like this for the mail would’ve ended in a lot of broken things.”

“I got the boxes and the supplies, but… Yes.” Lotor huffs and flips his cowlick off his face again. “Shiro did the actual packing. Then, I tried to help him take them to the post office so that he wouldn’t strain himself too terribly, but…” Shaking his head and rolling his eyes, Lotor drawls, “He was adamant about how he could handle everything himself. You know better than the rest of us how pigheadedly stubborn he gets when he sets his mind to it.”

Not that Keith wants to argue with that, but… “I dunno about that,” he says, giving Lotor a (mostly) playful smirk. “I haven’t resorted to shoving my tongue down his throat to help him realize that I’ve been flirting with him this entire fucking time.”

“Perhaps you _should_ resort to that, darling. It might _finally _move things along in the direction that both of you desire.”

“Where’d you find this?” Hunk says. He’s gotten his blush back under control, and he smiles evenly at Lotor. “I mean, if he’s any kind of special dog? I don’t know what he’s from or anything, but? He’s really cute, y’know?”

Lotor nods a bit too eagerly and his cheeks go tomato red again. “I have no idea whether or not he comes from any particular media or…” He shrugs, coming off more tired than nonchalant. “I found it at a flea market one weekend, and it made me think of you.”

Okay, even Keith can admit that Lotor’s being unreasonably freaking cute, right now. More so than he has any right to do, especially not when he’s sitting here in his long, black trench-coat, looking more goth trash than the rose petals that Keith’s been hacking up for Shiro. Regardless of how little sense it makes for Lotor to act like this or look so downright adorable? As Hunk reaches into the bag again, Lotor’s entire face lights up and he all but glues his eyes to Hunk, held rapt while Hunk pulls out a journal.

Another thing Keith can admit: the journal looks pretty cool. The smooth fabric covering over the book is a bright, vibrant shade of yellow, and there’s a design of a lion on the front, made out of black thread and multicolored beads. For a long moment, Hunk blinks at the journal and brushes his fingers over the beads, taking care not to upset them or yank out the stitches. With his guard down, he lets himself beam brighter than a spotlight, but might be off in his own world, mentally. He nods when Lotor explains that he found this at a California flea market as well, but Hunk’s reaction seems a bit perfunctory, like he’s being polite but not listening as well as he could.

Next, he takes out a little white box. Unwrapping that reveals a _Star Trek_ coffee mug. That shouldn’t attract too much notice on its own—Hunk likes _Star Trek_ as much as Shiro does, despite their slightly different tastes—but as Keith dunks a chicken finger in the ranch sauce, Hunk pouts at Lotor like he can’t believe what he’s holding. The reason why becomes obvious when Hunk spins the mug around and lets Keith get a glimpse of its design: a portrait of Lt. Commander Data on a solid black background.

Lotor frowns tightly and lets his eyes go wide. “Is… Is this okay? I felt certain that he was your favorite, but I didn’t know—”

“Yeah, no, he is my favorite, he’s always been that for me, I just…” Hunk’s eyes glisten without quite misting over, and his forehead knots up in confusion, or concern, or maybe fifteen things at once, because it doesn’t seem like Hunk can tell, himself. “I didn’t even know you _knew_ that he was my favorite? Did Shiro tell you or, like…”

“No? I simply… You’ve mentioned this before? Multiple times, but…” Lotor shrugs as though this is really nothing special. “The first incident I thought of when I found that in a pawn shop was, erm? I remembered the year when you tried to get a group costume together for New York Comic-Con. You said that you would fight to be Data for it, if necessary. Then, Lance was obnoxious about saying that nobody would want to fight you for the right to be Data, and he tried to insist on the supremacy of _Star Wars_ over _Star Trek_, and…”

Another quirk of the shoulders, like maybe Lotor really has no idea how much his recollection could mean to Hunk. “You would have made a quite fantastic Commander Data,” he says. “But until another chance for cosplay should present itself, I thought you might enjoy the mug?”

Hunk blinks at Lotor now, more or less entirely uncomprehending. As Keith swabs a chicken finger through some of the cheese sauce on his plate, he can practically see the gears spinning in Hunk’s head, trying to wrap his mind around what’s going on. At least he doesn’t do a Shiro, asking if this is real life or otherwise asserting that there’s no way that somebody would ever hit on him in earnest. Or remember his favorite_ Star Trek_ character in earnest—remember genuine details about Hunk and his interests—as the case currently is. _That_ would get very messy, very quickly, with Lotor feeling hurt and possibly offended, while Hunk, in all likelihood, mostly felt confused.

Apparently, there’s one more present left for Hunk in the bag—or so Lotor says as he slouches slightly and spears a piece of chicken on his fork. Even given that he had eighteen months to collect these little gifts, this seems a bit excessive. More accurately, it seems like the sort of thing that Keith would _want_ to give Shiro for his birthday, but then talk himself out of doing because Shiro might get stressed about how much effort Keith put into it. Or he might fall down a rabbit-hole of telling himself that he doesn’t deserve such kindness. Or he might rip himself into pieces in the lead-up to Keith’s birthday, trying to find or create a present that he felt matched Keith’s for quality but never feeling satisfied with any of his efforts.

Judging from the way Hunk blushes and mumbles that he’s gonna finish his sandwich first if that’s okay? He’s probably in an unfortunately similar boat. Hopefully, he’s nowhere near as lost in self-doubt as Shiro gets—but it isn’t hard to do better than Shiro about self-love.

There are other things that require Keith’s attention, though. Chief among them: Keith has more plate left for him than meal, so he focuses on catching Shay’s eye. No matter how he has Pidge covering for him with Ryner, he _will_ need to get back to work sooner rather than later, and that’s not happening until he’s had his order of dessert. Suffering through customers’ shenanigans all morning means that Keith has _earned_ this treat. Besides, it’s like Lotor said: Keith hasn’t put on weight by eating like a bird.

Once he gives Shay the hand-signal that means he’d like to have his brownie sundae soon, he wonders if he shouldn’t have asked to nix it from the order instead. Scraping up a spoonful of the mac and cheese, Keith feels a pang down in his stomach as if he’s swallowed a freaking bowling ball. As if simply looking at the food and thinking about swallowing it can cause him pain or give his stomach cause for protest. A swig of Coke doesn’t help much, either. The chill is nice, and the fizzy, bubbling feeling serves as a decent enough distraction. But it doesn’t ease any of the pressure in his gut. It doesn’t make his belly feel any lighter. It doesn’t stop him from feeling like he might’ve set himself a task that he wasn’t truly ready for or tried to get through more lunch than he could handle, at the moment.

Keith Kogane is not a quitter, though. Whether or not he’s still recording this lunch for other folks’ consumption, Keith keeps going and doesn’t let challenges get the better of him. He needs to eat faster. Needs to cram as much food into his gut as possible before he lets himself get too caught up in any of his doubts or in feeling like he should quit while he’s more or less ahead.

Taking a deep breath, Keith steels himself. Summons up every bit of resolve that he has in him. Wiggles in his seat as he adjusts the waistband of his jeans, nudges it underneath his belly instead of trying to keep it up where they’re supposed to hit him. He just got these jeans for Christmas and they fit him fine. There’s even a bit of give around the waist, so that Keith can get more mileage out of these jeans before they’re in danger of losing their button or busting any seams—but God, they’re getting tight, today. As his stomach flops out, slumping toward his lap, relief floods over Keith and he groans softly.

When he rests a hand on the fullest curve along his middle, Keith finds his stomach hard to the touch. Sure, it has enough give to it for him to rub himself more easily. To knead at his gut in the hopes of working out some of what he’s feeling. This makes something bubble up in protest. That, in turn, almost feels like it could help him to get through this stuffing, but then decides to make Keith belch instead. He muffles it behind one hand, but doesn’t keep it quiet enough, so Hunk and Lotor stare at him until he mutters an, _“Excuse me, sorry”_—but Keith can’t let himself get too caught up in their reactions. Not until he cleans up the rest of his food. Not until he has definitively beaten the game that he dragged himself into.

Fortunately, Shay has perfect timing today. As soon as Keith finishes his last bite of mac and cheese, she’s right there with the huge dish of brownie sundae and three spoons. Hunk won’t use his to steal any bites from Keith because he never does. Whether or not Lotor seizes the opportunity depends on how his sweet tooth’s feeling today, but Keith can’t focus on that. Giving more attention to what Lotor _might_ do wastes the time that Keith needs to spend on stuffing himself as much as possible before he has to quit.

Lotor gives a low, impressed whistle as Keith digs into the first scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough and one of the enormous brownies. “Alright, I know what I said before darling? And I stand by that claim, I do. But, honestly…” Lotor sighs as if someone’s taken all the wind out of his sails. “I have no idea where you’re putting all of that. Even with the weight you’ve put on lately—”

“Don’t try to explain it, man,” Hunk tells him, sounding more than slightly tired. “Sometimes, the way Keith eats anymore defies all logical explanation. He is a wild man, the limit does not exist, and like? I’m not entirely convinced that he _doesn’t_ have a pocket dimension hidden in his stomach…” Hunk shrugs, grinning hopefully. “I mean, it’s pretty freaking unlikely, but… It _would_ make an awful lot of sense… If you really think about it, yeah?”

With a pensive hum, Lotor supposes that the idea is a bit more science-fiction than reality tends to allow for, but he could nevertheless see that explanation making sense. Still, he refuses to commit to anything without more closely surveying the current situation and taking in more details of it. Keith’s skin tingles and threatens to start crawling as Lotor takes in a good, long look of how his body’s doing, pointedly arches a brow down at Keith’s tummy. But Keith rolls his eyes, he kneads at a particularly hard spot on his belly, and with a sigh, he scarfs down three huge spoonfuls of dessert so quickly that he barely has a chance to taste them.

This approach gets Keith through more than half of his sundae, but as usual, it proves unsustainable. Or at least, Keith needs a temporary break, a moment to breathe and rub his own belly so that he won’t get sick. Slouching back in his seat, he abandons his spoon, leaves it sticking out of the ice cream for when he’s ready to get back to eating. As he massages his stomach with both hands, Keith smiles. Not only is he doing well at this, but he paused right as Hunk reaches for his gift again.

Once more, Hunk first needs to put an absurd amount of tissue paper on the bench beside him. He clears practically everything out of the bag before he finally comes up with his prize: two mid-sized hardback books, about equally thick, each one looking intact but lightly used. Whatever they are, Hunk gasps softly and gapes at them, letting his mouth go slack and his eyes go wide in some mix of eagerness and appreciation. He gives Lotor another disbelieving look, as if he can’t fathom that anyone would ever put so much thought into a gift for him, and when Hunk sets the books down on the table, Keith immediately figures why.

They’re cookbooks, both of them. Moreover, there’s no way that they aren’t meant to be significant, considering the Lotor of it all. The first book that Keith looks at apparently contains traditional Altean recipes, as well as the histories of the dishes that it shares. The second book has traditional Galra recipes instead, though its cover also promises to share history and cultural contexts that inform the recipes.

“They aren’t much, not really,” Lotor says quietly, looking at his own hands instead of Hunk. He’s wringing them around each other so tightly, it’s a wonder that he doesn’t cut off circulation in his fingers. “And I don’t know? Shiro didn’t know if you already had them or not—I rather thought that I remembered… I thought that you’d said something about had some trouble finding more reliable sources on Galra cuisine? Or perspectives other than Sal’s? And at finding _any_ sources on Altean cooking that were not Allura or her parents—who are perfectly fine, and I would not say that they aren’t? But it’s understandable that you’d want something else to rely on, too—”

“Are you seriously trying to apologize for this?” Keith should keep his opinions to himself right now. Not least because he groans as soon as he’s said this, finding another tight spot in his belly and rubbing at it hard. Once he has his wits back about him, though, he adds, “Seriously, Lotor? This is _really cool_. I’m not gonna speak for Hunk—”

“Then stop talking,” Lotor tells him without completely snapping. “Pay attention to whatever you’re doing with—”

“He’s right, though?”

Hunk says this almost timidly, slouching as if he’s trying to take up less space. Getting Lotor to look up at him again makes him blush and scratch awkwardly at the back of his neck. But his free hand doesn’t leave the front cover of the Altean cookbook. Hunk might as well be caressing the thing, going starry-eyed at Lotor and holding onto the book as if it means the world to him and more. Even given how much he loves cooking, this seems excessive.

Not that Lotor’s doing too much better. His blush flares up with a vengeance and this time, it spreads to the tips of his ears. His hands clench tighter around themselves—trembling and going so white-knuckled that Keith’s hands ache with sympathetic pain—and his lips purse so far into each other that they nearly disappear. As Keith chokes down a moan and tries not to ruin whatever kind of moment his friends are having, Lotor gives Hunk a look that is, for want of any better word, really fucking _weird_.

At least, seeing such an expression on _Lotor’s_ face is really fucking weird. His eyes open wider than usual without truly looking startled. There’s a dazed quality to his slackened jaw and the way he blinks at Hunk. When he forces himself to smile, his mouth quivers like it could snap or shatter into pieces. As if his lips are an irreplaceable family heirloom resting on a rickety pedestal, getting knocked around by a mischievous cat. Something soft glimmers behind his eyes like a threat for them to start tearing up. They _don’t_, but the potential is definitely there. Worse, something about Lotor feels like he’s _aching_ for them to make good on that instead of teasing him with the idea that he _could_ start crying..

What stands out most, though, is the openness. The vulnerability. The way that, for once, Lotor has completely dropped any semblance of performance, even when he starts spluttering, throwing out a series of half-baked syllables and throaty noises as he tries to say something and then decides to doubt himself. If Keith didn’t know any better, he’d think that Lotor had stopped caring what people think of him entirely.

When Lotor finally manages to use his words, all he has to say is, “Truly, my dear? You like them—”

“Oh my God, yes. Did you look at the sources that they list in the backs, or—”

“Of course I did. If they wish to purport themselves as, you know, any sort of authority? Then one needs to double-check, and—”

“And the pictures in here are _amazing_?” Hunk still looks uneasy, but as he flips through the Altean cookbook, there’s no mistaking his eagerness and energy. “And oh my God, I’ve been trying to find recipes for some of these things… Allura and Coran have told me about them? But they almost never have any exact recipes for me? And their descriptions leave a lot to be desired? From a culinary standpoint, I mean—”

“Oh, thank _God…_” Lotor’s entire body slackens as he lets out a sigh of deep relief. Propping himself up on his elbows, he beams as though Hunk has become the center of the entire universe. “I was so worried that you might not…? I mean, of course you love your work, and everyone knows how much you enjoy cooking, but? It can also be a sore subject for you—”

“When other people don’t appreciate it, sure. Or if they start talking about it like it’s not a worthwhile pastime. Or when they talk like I only learned how to cook so I could eat more, or… y’know, things like that?” Although he’s still smiling, Hunk softens somewhat, looking at Lotor sympathetically and with a bit of concern. “I don’t mind being known as an enthusiastic gourmand with an incredible palate, though? And, like? You were totally right, I’ve had a lot of trouble in trying to find help with these recipes—”

“There is some additional help in those books, as well.” Prying himself out of the cushions, Lotor scoots closer to Hunk. Nearly knocks his smoothie over with his elbow, but luckily for everyone, Keith manages to catch it. Not that Lotor notices, still mooning over Hunk as he explains, “Both of them have some of their previous owners’ notes scribbled in the backs or on some pages? It all felt very, _‘This book is property of the Half-Blood Prince’_—”

“As long as there’s no Dark magic anywhere,” Hunk laughs.

“Never fear, I double-checked. Specifically to prevent such a fate from finding you.” Lotor‘s cheeks twinge pink as he adds, “Also, so I could translate any notes that were not in English… I annotated in purple glitter pen, so… I mean, I did it so my translations would be easier to read? But you cannot miss my notes—”

“I think I’d know where your notes are anyway.” Leaning toward Lotor, Hunk lowers his voice. He doesn’t _quite_ slip into the tone he uses when he’s trying to make things get romantic—m but he has a glimmer in his eyes that says he’s up to _something_. “I mean, I don’t know how I’d know—it’s not like I have an eidetic memory for handwriting or like I’m trying to be creepy, either? Or that I have any untoward intentions?”

…Okay, maybe Hunk would be up to something if he were deliberately lowering his voice.

God, Keith probably has no room to judge either him of Lotor for any of this. Still, as he presses his hands into his belly’s sides, Keith needs every moral fiber that he has to keep from rolling his eyes or otherwise letting his friends know exactly how sad this display of mutual interest is. Telling them so would only make it more difficult for both of them. Hunk would feel inept and clam up. Lotor would feel judged and retreat into himself. They’d go back to dancing around each other like Keith and Shiro have done for long enough that nobody remembers when they started—and Jesus knows, The Gang only needs one set of idiots like that.

So, Keith keeps kneading at his belly. He rolls his teeth over his lip, trying not to mind the way that Lotor makes the cushion shift beneath him as he wiggles right up to the edge of the booth. When Lotor slouches closer to Hunk and mumbles _something_ that doesn’t even sound like real words—whether in English, Galran, Altean, French, or whichever other languages that Lotor speaks—Keith keeps his mouth shut and says nothing about how Lotor sounds like he’s talking around a mouthful of peanut butter.

Apparently understanding what Lotor thinks he’s saying, Hunk chuckles. “I mean, I totally could make that for you some night soon? I won’t promise you I’ll get it exactly right, especially if I can’t get in any practice first—”

“Oh, no, please, you don’t need that—don’t need to _do_ that, I mean, just…” Lotor heaves a deep sigh and wilts as though he’s shouldering an anvil. “Please, don’t feel completely chained to the old recipes? If you feel so inspired, then I would hate for you to stifle your creativity. Or to put tradition over experimenting. You truly _are_ a culinary artist, and you should feel free to—”

“I don’t know if I’d say that—”

“You deserve the title, my dear. Laypersons do not put in a fraction of the love or innovation that you rely on—”

“Buttering me up,” Hunk laughs. “You’re doing that, I mean—”

“I would _never_—”

“You’re going in like I’m a lobster and you wanna dunk me in some lemon garlic butter sauce.” Maybe so, Hunk says this without judgment or condemnation. There isn’t even any anger. “Not that I’m complaining necessarily, because? Hey, if you wanna keep saying nice things about me? I’m feeling up to it today…”

It’s a great plan that Keith has. Tuning these losers out as much as possible should handle everything just fine and get Keith through the rest of this until he needs to get back to the bookstore. The massage that he gives himself gets his stomach calmed down and feeling like he could stand to go at the rest of his sundae. Putting that part of himself at ease makes Hunk and Lotor’s flirting less vexing. Makes their back-and-forth feel less like somebody’s putting Keith’s nerves through a cheese grater. Hell, rubbing at his stomach even makes them start sounding cute rather than low-grade obnoxious.

As he reaches over to tuck Lotor’s cowlick behind his ear, Hunk is all smiles, looking more comfortable than Keith’s seen him get in _months_—and getting a distinctly impish glint in his eye as he says, “Turnabout is fair play, though—”

Lotor groans softly. “Oh no, my dear, you cannot mean to—”

“I really liked the last screenplay draft you sent me,” Hunk tells him, earnestness seeping out into the diner even as his lips tease like he might smirk. “I guess it’s probably seen a few more revisions since then? But the stuff you were doing with the story—it seemed like you and Shiro were carving out more of the story that _you_ really want to tell? And your lines of dialogue were always brilliant—”

“We did not include attributions—”

“No, and I don’t think most people could tell the difference? Because you guys really have brought it all together and made it feel more cohesive? Less like two writers arguing about the story through the script?” Shrugging, Hunk supposes, “But I could tell which lines were yours. Or I thought I could, I guess? But you and Shiro have different styles—”

“Not even our screenwriting professors could pick out that much detail—”

“Seriously? How could they _not_? And neither of you is _bad_ at dialogue or anything? But Shiro takes a more naturalistic approach that feels more like things that people say in real life, but can sometimes come off kinda stilted?” Hunk looks Lotor in the eye while adding, “But then, _your_ dialogue… It _flows_, and it always feels _alive_—and it’s usually hilarious? But in a really smart and clever way? And it has substance to it? It _says something_ instead of just being funny but kinda empty? Like, Oscar Wilde would totally be proud of how he’s influenced you—”

Blushing a bright, summery shade of pink, Lotor ducks his chin. “That’s incredibly high praise for me—”

“Well, you deserve it. Because your work is honestly amazing—”

“Oh, I don’t know if I would say that—not that I will stop _you_ from saying it—” Lotor cuts himself off with a round of breathless chuckling. He might as well be surrounded by falling cartoon hearts, with the gooey way he’s smiling. Looking at him makes Keith’s mouth feel like he’s got caramel stuck between his teeth. “I mean, as long as telling me this is what you wish—”

“I don’t just wish,” Hunk tells him. “I’m a _doer_. And I am telling you: your dialogue in the script is great? But it’s nowhere near as sweet as you.”

Keith _does_ let himself roll his eyes, at this. Hunk and Lotor aren’t paying attention to him anyway, and holy God almighty, that line is cheesier than a boutique retailer of high-end expensive cheese. It is so cheesy that Keith would ask Allura what kind of wine and fruit to pair it with for Shiro’s birthday, then ignore her suggestions because they’d all be too expensive and put Hunk’s flirting on Ritz crackers with some Cherry Coke and vaguely cherry-flavored water for Shiro. Or cherry-infused tea. Or whatever he wants to drink.

The cheese does what Hunk wants it to, though. Lotor lights up like a Christmas tree, grinning as if he has literally never been so happy, and he sighs like it’s taking all his energy to keep from swooning in the middle of the diner. Which is good because Keith doesn’t want to spend the rest of his break cleaning up a discombobulated puddle that used to be Lotor. Looking at Hunk and only Hunk, Lotor shuffles around. Adjusts his position as if he means to lean over the table and kiss the boy already before Keith chokes on all the underlying tension. Once he’s found a position that suits him, he drops his elbow, and then—

_Clink! Splat!_

Jerked out of the dish, Keith’s spoon thwacks into the table and sends ice cream flying.

As a scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough hits him in the cheek, just below the eye, Lotor flinches like he’s been smacked.

For a moment, he does nothing. Sits there, breathing deeply, as if he can’t process what’s just happened but he’s trying not to cry. Some of the ice cream goops up on his skin, and a big piece of cookie dough tries to stick to him. Tries to install itself like an art exhibit on the apple of Lotor’s cheek. Most of the frozen dairy treat, though, slides down Lotor’s pointy face in perfect time with the long, slow whine that he lets creak out of him.

Before Keith can think better of it, he deadpans, “Excuse you, but? I was still eating that.”

Lotor nods, which only makes the ice cream slip around his skin. “I realize that, darling.”

“Do you not know how to keep your elbows to yourself—”

“You still have _plenty_ of ice cream—”

“Maybe you should go clean up?” Hunk suggests gingerly, as if he’s tiptoeing around a broken Faberge egg. “Instead of arguing with Keith? I mean, your skin will get all sticky if you wait too long, and it might be harder to clean up—”

With another whine and a quick nod, Lotor excuses himself. He darts toward the restrooms as if nothing’s gonna stop him. But as he dodges a table, Lotor must miss the sign that says _“Caution—Wet Floor.”_ He skids, yelps, and clatters to his ass.

Keith frowns in that direction for long enough to make sure that Lotor’s fine. If he stays down too long, then Keith or Hunk will need to go over and help him up. When he tugs himself to his feet and skitters away as if nothing even happened, Keith shakes his head. Rolling his eyes, he looks back to Hunk.

“What a mess,” Keith huffs. “He actually had his shit together until he started flirting with you.”

“Considering you and Shiro, man? I don’t think you’re in a place to judge.”

“Not that I was judging, because I wasn’t? But I don’t fall all over myself with Shiro like Lotor did for you.”

“But have you told him how you feel about him, though?” Hunk arches an eyebrow but doesn’t quite make it pointed. Probably because he knows the answer without Keith slouching and digging back into his sundae. With a huff, he says, “He’s been back for a week, dude. Better get on it quick. Before he decides that you aren’t interested after all and the rest of us have to deal with you being jealous of his new boyfriend.”

Despite his mouthful of brownie, ice cream, and hot fudge, Keith scoffs and lets his eyes glaze over with impatience. Once he’s swallowed, he tells Hunk flatly, “That’s a great threat. Except for the part where Shiro gets a new boyfriend.”

“You’ve heard what everybody else is saying about him, right? Maybe you could afford to wait _before_ he left, but now that _normal_ people can see he’s hot…” Hunk makes a grumbling, noncommittal sound and quirks his shoulders. “Whatever, man. I’m happy for him. He’s finally living his chubby duckling fantasy. Working himself out into the skinny bitch little swan he always wanted to be—”

He rolls his eyes when Keith balks. “Are you kidding me? He _loves _it when Lotor calls him that. You could light up Madison Square Gardens with the look that Shiro gets when Lotor calls him a skinny bitch.”

“What, because he doesn’t _argue_ with it?” Getting a shrug like _“you said it, not me”_ out of Hunk makes Keith groan. His spoon clatters in the dish, and he thumps his head back against the booth, and rushes to explain, “That doesn’t mean that he’s _okay _with it! Come on, man, he bites his tongue _so much_ when people talk about him. You _know_ this. You know _Shiro_—”

“I know Shiro is a human disaster who puts too much value on whether or not he has abs—”

“He worked hard for them! What, like he’s not allowed to be proud of himself anymore?”

As if he hasn’t heard anything Keith said, Hunk continues, “I know _you_ have done a complete about-face because you think he looks hot—”

Groaning and sinking into the bench, Keith knows he should have words right now. He should suck it up and hardcore defend Shiro, if not himself, against whatever accusation Hunk thinks he’s building up to. But fuck all this for a picnic basket, Keith’s brain feels like it’s full of buzzing wasps, and trying to summon up words like an actual adult isn’t happening right now. He only manages a heavy sigh and letting his foot _“accidentally”_ knock into Hunk’s shin as he splays his legs wherever they feel like going.

Unimpressed, Hunk purses his lips. “Look, I’m just saying: I saw you ogling him while he did push-ups yesterday. I saw you ogling him when he got back from the gym today. And, really, dude? I’m not trying to be harsh, I’m _just saying_…” Hunk slouches so he’s exactly on Keith’s level and looking him in the eye. “If you hadn’t lost your head and stared at him like that—”

“Like _how_? Like a person who has _eyes_?”

“And if you hadn’t called him _‘Pretty Boy,’_ and glued your eyeballs to his ass, and stuff _before_ he lost nearly half his body weight?” Hunk quirks his eyebrows, but only briefly. If Keith didn’t know him better, he might guess that Hunk never even smiles. “I would be _so_ freaking disappointed in you without all that context, okay? Because I know that you’re better than this—”

“Better than _what_?” Keith squawks in a way that reminds him of Lance on a bad day. “Better than thinking that he’s hot no matter what and still being into him? Better than loving the beautiful idiot, however he wants to look today?”

Hunk rolls his eyes like he can’t believe this needs explaining. “Better than doing a one-eighty from, ‘Oh my God, how could he give up on his body positive self-acceptance work, how could he stop listening us, ooooh Hunk, I feel so terribly betrayed’? To mooning over Shiro’s abs like a freaking _horny schoolboy_.” Hunk’s face and his delivery sure edge toward a sneer, but stop just short of going all the way. “Never mind how you switched teams before we know for sure that he’s interested in literally _anything_ but how he looks. As if he’s only hot when he’s got a body like Chris freaking Evans.”

“Hugh Jackman as Wolverine,” Keith bites out before he can stop himself. “Not that it _matters_. Because Shiro _isn’t _going after that anymore—”

“Or so he_ claims_.”

Those words drop into the air so simply and with such certainty that all Keith can do is gape. “…Wait, what?”

Hunk shrugs. “You heard me.”

“I heard you, but that doesn’t mean I’m, like… And it doesn’t mean you’re making…” Keith shakes his head, but doesn’t rattle any mental wires back where they belong. “Seriously, what are you talking about?”

“Playing stupid really doesn’t suit you, y’know—”

“I’m not playing _anything_! I’m honest to fuck not following you, just…” God, Keith hates how small and tight his voice gets when somebody winds him up like this. When they dangle a very pressing Bad Thing in front of him and refuse to tell him what it is and let him help. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, okay? For real. Everything seemed legit when I talked to him and Lotor. Not my first choice for him personally, but also not like Shiro was doing anything to hurt himself.”

As he scoots forward, Keith’s hand knocks into his ice cream dish. Rolling his eyes, he pushes it aside. Who cares about finishing what he’s paying for, in light of what Hunk’s been saying? Keith reaches out cautiously, knowing all too well how much unexpected physical contact can suck for people, and he only curls a hand around Hunk’s wrist when Hunk nods that it’s okay.

“Hunk, can you,” he says. “If Shiro’s not okay, then I don’t want… _Please_, just tell me what you mean?”

Hunk considers this—but in the end, he only shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it. You’re probably right, forget I said anything.”

“Dude, come on! You can’t say shit like that about him, or imply whatever you’re doing, and then—”

“It’s _nothing_, Keith.” Sighing, Hunk squirms like he can’t get comfortable in his own skin, much less anywhere else in the world. “I’m probably reading way too much into things. And seeing stuff that isn’t there. If Shiro likes working out like he does now? And if he’s _honestly_ happy with his diet, as long as it doesn’t get wildly unhealthy, then… Like he says, it’s his body, right?” Another shake of the head, and Hunk huffs like he needs to reassure himself of Lord only knows what.

Squeezing Hunk’s wrist gently, Keith makes himself look his friend in the eye. “I don’t know what to tell you? Or what to say, or any of what…” Admitting this is difficult enough, but Keith owes Hunk more than that total copout about not knowing what to say. He owes Hunk something better, whatever it ends up being. “For what little it’s worth, right now—”

“You’re worth a _lot_ to me, okay—”

“For whatever my _opinion _is worth right now? When I’m kinda totally _biased_ because it’s _Shiro_?” Keith arches his eyebrows, silently daring Hunk to interrupt again. “I don’t know how I feel about his abs, okay? And I’m _not_ just blanketly approving of them. Yes, I think he’s hot, but when he just showed up in that stupid crop-top? I didn’t _expect_ to like what he’s done with his body—”

“Dude, really?” Instead of cowering at Keith’s glare, Hunk gazes back with the most singularly unimpressed expression that Keith has ever seen on him. “Unless Shiro got a personality transplant out in California? Or unless he got replaced by an evil clone, or a _literal_ doppelgänger, or a Cylon or something? You would’ve found your way to liking how he looks sooner or later. I kinda wish it had come _later_, but…”

“A threesome with Shiro and his evil clone would be, like, _stupid _fucking hot,” Keith supposes before he can stop himself. But a quick jerk of the head gets him back on track: “You’re kinda making my point for me? ‘cause it’s like… He has abs now, yeah. And he runs five miles every morning. And he can do the push-ups where you clap between reps, and he could probably do them with me lying on his back—”

“Keith, no—”

“I’m not saying that he _would_ do that, but y’know? If he ever wanted to _try_—”

“_Keith_.” Hunk’s eyes flash dangerously. “You’re like family to me and I love you. And I am telling you: _no_. That is one of the most potentially dangerous ideas that you’ve had in the past _six months_. Especially since Shiro totally _would_ try it, and if he messed up on the first go? He’d push himself to the limit until he pulled it off.”

Keith huffs and blows his bangs off his forehead. “Point taken. But the fact that you can even _make_ that point? Just means I’m right.”

“Uh, if you so much as _think _about proposing that idea to him? You will start being hella wrong.”

“I mean about my other point, dude. _Jesus_…” Keith takes a deep breath. He sighs. He squeezes Hunk’s wrist—more for himself than Hunk—and makes himself meet Hunk’s eyes again as he says, “Underneath the eight-pack abs, and the bear-choking thighs, and actually _going_ to the gym? He’s still our Shiro. He likes George Michael, Emilie Autumn, and super tacky, smutty bodice rippers. He feels like he doesn’t deserve to have his Grandfather’s personal name, he makes bad jokes about his mental health, and he knows all the words to ‘It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).’ He looks at dog adoption websites and saves pictures of the dogs he likes in a folder called, ‘Totally not photos from dog adoption websites.’”

Keith can’t help smirking fondly as he adds, “Did you see his first Instagram post since getting back?”

“You mean the one of you napping in his bed, snuggling a pack of Oreos? With the caption about your _seduction technique_?”

“Case, set, match. Shiro hasn’t changed _that_ much. The defense rests.”

Hunk snorts appreciatively. “Nice mix of metaphors there, counselor,” he says, and he smiles like he’s going to tack on something else. Knowing Hunk—more importantly, knowing how much he keeps pent up inside himself, even when things deeply bother him—there’s a lot that he could add, so much that he probably _needs_ to say.

Instead, he shivers. He looks as though he might be sick. He jerks his wrist out of Keith’s grip just in time to cover his mouth as he starts coughing. When he pulls back, there’s a heap of black rose petals sitting in his palm.

A chill drops to the pit of Keith’s stomach and doesn’t ease up when he kneads his belly against the edge of the table. That works out a tense spot where Keith feels too full, but it still leaves him reeling as what this means clicks into place. Sure, there are only so many flowers in the world and only so many colors. Yes, black roses are likely not that uncommon during people’s Hanahaki flare-ups. But the petals in Hunk’s hand look just like the ones that Keith’s been coughing up in his Target bag all day. Besides, nobody else Keith knows has ever made people spew petals like that. Only Shiro.

Considering everything Hunk’s said… Given the way that he’s been talking… The way that he can barely be in the same room as Shiro lately—at least, not for too long before he huffs off to his own room, or starts rolling his eyes over seemingly everything that Shiro says or does… Keith doesn’t mean to pout as he looks up at his friend. But he feels his lips curling up into one like they don’t care what he wants or doesn’t. Because this all adds up to something, and Keith really, _really_ doesn’t like it.

“Oh my _God_,” Hunk groans. “Dude, please don’t get jealous or start being all—”

“Why would I be jealous?” Keith furrows his brow right back at Hunk’s skeptical expression. “How many times have I had platonic Hanahaki in my life, dude. Besides, if you _were_ having it over Shiro romantically, you still want me and him to be together more than you want him for yourself. Which is its own… y’know, tangled, messy _thing_? Except it isn’t really? Because you’re not _into him_ like that?”

Taking a deep breath, Hunk considers that. Nods and slouches in his seat. Tosses the rose petals into Keith’s plastic bag. “Well, however I’m into him, it’s a flipping mess,” he says, rubbing some of Keith’s sanitizer over his hands. “‘cause it’d be enough to just feel the things that made me hack up those. Then, you’ve got _knowing_ that he probably didn’t mean to make me feel like that. Then, there’s how knowing that doesn’t _help_. And then, there’s the purple rhododendrons on top of it all—”

“Wait, you mean…” Keith whips his head toward the restrooms, just to be sure they aren’t being overheard—or in danger of a specific person overhearing. As he settles again, he says, “Dude, in what reality is Lotor _anything_ but totally into you?”

“I mean, if you look at the actual parameters of multiverse theory? Infinitude means that there will be realities where he’s not into me like that. Realities where he hates me. Realities where he’s a _Tyrannosaurus rex _and I’m a spoon. We’ve simply got no way of predicting—”

“Okay, _Slav_. In this specific reality where we live right now, how is Lotor’s behavior _anything_ but a sign that he’s into you exactly like we’re thinking.” Huffing, Keith allows himself to slump onto the table, because sitting up straight sounds like a lot of effort for no worthwhile payoff, at the moment. “I’m on the freaking spectrum and I needed Lotor to _tell me_ that Shiro’s in love with me before I believed it. Even I can tell that Lotor wants you to make him swoon and sweep him off his feet like a scene straight out of Shiro’s more traditional shitty bodice rippers, instead of all the weird space alien bondage ones. Like, come on, he’s not exactly _subtle_—”

“No, I _know_ that Lotor wants to sleep with me. That’s obvious, he’s been upfront about that…” Hunk quirks his shoulders and idly ties knots along a discarded straw-wrapper. “It’s one thing for him to think I’m hot and want sex. But whether or not he wants anything _else_ is just…”

It takes a moment for Keith’s brain to catch up to what Hunk’s implying.

When he gets there, all he manages to say is, “_Ohhhhh_.”

“Yeah. My point.” Hunk sighs. He flicks a piece of knotted wrapper across the table, but he doesn’t even smirk when he hits Keith right between the eyes. “Anyway, I’m just glad that I could get off early today to go see my doctor about this—”

“Wait, yeah! Good thing, because like…” Frowning, Keith bats his foot at Hunk’s ankle. “I’ve never had Hanahaki for two people at once—”

“Well, I thought it only happened in Shiro’s bodice rippers and Lance’s _novelas_, so…”

As soon as Hunk’s arms drop back to the table, Keith curls a hand around his wrist again. “Let me know how it goes, yeah? ‘cause, I mean…” He frowns and swallows thickly. “That’s gotta suck? And it could get dangerous really easily?” Squeezing Hunk gently, he says, “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you over mismanaged Hanahaki.”

Although this makes Hunk smile—although he slips out of Keith’s grip so he can hold Keith’s hand instead—something about his expression still seems _off_. If Keith could put his finger on _why_ he doesn’t like the look on Hunk’s face? If he could actually name what it is that makes Hunk seem like he’s screaming on the inside? Then maybe it would be easier to watch him look like this, because Keith could do something about it. At the very least, he’d be able to concoct a _plan_ for how he _could_ do something.

For now, though, Hunk squeezing his hand is all Keith has by way of reassurance.

“Don’t worry about it _too_ much, man.” Hunk promises, “I’ll take care of myself. Anything to stop choking on these freaking lung-flowers.”


	8. Chapter 8

Having Sunday off from the diner and the bookstore should be enjoyable, or if not that, relaxing.

Unfortunately, Shiro and Lotor have another grant proposal that they need to work on. Hunk and Keith can’t argue with having Lotor over, either, not when he and Shiro are trying to find money so they can actually make their feature-length off-kilter, bittersweet, vaguely rom-com-adjacent movie. Since they first started writing it in undergrad, they’ve put so much work into this idea. Even with the other, smaller projects that they’ve worked on in the interim, they’re _dedicated_ to this one above all others. Both of them have put so much of their hearts and souls into writing the screenplay, revising and improving it, making The Gang review their drafts and soliciting opinions from their professors, their bosses, their coworkers, their writing groups…

At this point, if they don’t get to make the movie someday, then they might be the first recorded cases of someone having a Hanahaki flare-up over a creative project and not another person. That’s fine, and it’s understandable that they need time and space to work.

By the time Hunk and Keith skulk up to Ryollurance’s place, though, Lotor and Shiro have been working for three hours straight and moved on to debating the ethics of having sugar daddies pay for their production. This is the closest they get to taking a break during their work sessions—and selfishly, Keith is glad that Lotor has dropped his, _“Why don’t we sexually service wealthy older men until we raise enough money to get started”_ argument that makes everyone but Ezor get uncomfortable—but that doesn’t mean that Hunk and Keith want to hang around and listen to it. On one hand, there’s the obvious point about how they could put up a crowdfunding page like every other would-be _auteur_ on the Internet, and it’s ridiculous that neither of The Gang’s resident genius prodigies comes up with this idea on his own.

On the other hand, Lotor makes Hunk look green around the gills with his never-ending stream of comments about how Shiro didn’t make himself a skinny bitch for nothing and if he loves his hateful abs some much, then he should honestly use them for a good cause—and he makes _Keith_ feel like kicking in a door for the sheer fucking joy of kicking something. Maybe if Shiro would put up more of an argument, Keith could stand to hear this shit. But after Lotor proposes this for the third time, all Shiro does is roll his eyes and say, _“Yeah, because any sugar daddies Maurice could hook me up with **really** would want me as their baby, now.”_

As soon as Ryou lets them in, Keith flops into his favorite spot on the triad’s oversized sofa. While Hunk joins Allura, Lance, and their laptops at the table, Blue hops up to join Keith. Lance grumbles and rolls his eyes about this—his and Allura’s chunky, short-haired ginger cat loves pretty much everybody, but Lance so easily gets sore that Blue likes Keith more than most people—but whatever he’s working on keeps him too engrossed to make too much fuss. Before Keith can lose himself in petting her and feeling her purrs vibrate against him, though, Ryou has to take up the armchair and peer at Keith like an overly curious owl who should probably drop whatever subject he things he’s on about and go hunt for voles like an owl who wants to eat tonight.

In true Shirogane fashion, though, Ryou does the exact opposite of what he should and deadpans, “What did Kashi do _this_ time.”

“Nothing special,” Keith huffs. “Anyway, nothing I can really hold against him.”

Explaining the grant proposal work makes Allura, Lance, and Ryou all groan knowingly. They haven’t dealt with Shiro and Lotor’s work sessions quite as intimately as Keith and Hunk, but nevertheless: everybody here knows why Keith and Hunk required sanctuary. As if she can tell what’s going on for real, Blue sighs and buffs her cheek against Keith’s chest. She sprawls out on her side and gives him perfect access for rubbing her belly, like she can actually tell that Keith needs contact this as much as she enjoys being lavished with attention. Like she inexplicably _knows_ that giving her this gentle affection soothes his nerves when it feels like they could straight unravel themselves all over everything.

Relying on a cat for one of his favorite stims likely wasn’t one of Keith’s better ideas. At least Blue is usually amenable, though.

“You know what really kills me about the whole thing, though,” Keith says with a sigh, coming to the end of his explanation.

Before he can answer his own question, Lance cuts in with, “The fact that Shiro looks like a model and still isn’t letting himself have sex with you?” When Keith glares at him, Lance shrugs as if asking what Keith expects him to say or do about this situation. “I’m just saying, man. He’s probably the only person on the planet who doesn’t know how many times you’ve had a Hanahaki flare-up over his stupid ass.”

“As far as I am aware,” Allura chimes in primly, “Shiro still believes that romantic feelings about Hunk and myself caused several of Keith’s previous flare-ups that, actually…”

She trails off because she doesn’t even need to say the rest. Everybody here knows good and goddamn well what she means. Pushing her hot pink glasses back up her nose, she throws Keith a small, sympathetic smile. He curls his hands into a heart at her, but immediately goes back to stroking one hand up and down Blue’s tummy. The other, Keith holds up by way of saying that he doesn’t need anybody interjecting or trying to prod him into anything. He needs to consider his feelings and what words he wants to use for them, but he’ll get there on his own, if they give him the quiet moments that he needs.

“What _really_ kills me about this afternoon? Is what Shiro said about Maurice.” Even thinking about it makes him sigh. His petting hand stills and drops, which makes Blue lick at the back of his wrist. Whether she’s trying to support him or trying to demand attention, Keith isn’t sure at all and he can’t speak Cat, so there’s no way for him to ask.

Regardless, her licking helps him center himself enough to say, “Not that I have anything against Maurice exactly, since I never even _met_ him personally? And breaking up for the sake of Shiro’s well-being probably means he wasn’t all that bad—”

“He only tried to keep their relationship quiet so Kashi wouldn’t get hounded by the paparazzi. A former New England Patriot and Super Bowl MVP dating a twenty-three-year-old guy? Perez Hilton and _E! News_ would’ve eaten my brother _alive_.” Without looking up from his beaten-up, yellowed paperback of _Salem’s Lot_, Ryou says, “Maurice was twice Kashi’s age, and had Ojiisan still been alive when they were still together? I would’ve encouraged Kashi to let him meet Maurice. Because he was respectful, he treated my brother right, he loved the idiot—”

Whining more than he likes, Keith thumps his head back into a throw-pillow.

“I’m just saying, Spitfire. Maurice was nowhere near as bad as your inner green-eyed monster wanted him to be. Quite the opposite, really.”

Keith glowers at the ceiling instead of doing it at Ryou and digging himself an even deeper hole. “Anyway, I’m not even really upset about Maurice himself,” he says, failing to sound as though he heard anything that Ryou told him. “What gets me is how Shiro’s like, ‘Oh, I can’t ask my ex to hook me up with a sugar daddy because I have abs now, and all of Maurice’s _real_ friends are from that freaking big guy club with the long weekend kinky fat guy sex party out in Kansas’—”

“Wait, why would Shiro even _need_ to ask his ex for help with sugar daddies?” Lance’s head pops up from his computer again and he scowls in the way that always comes when he can’t figure something out. “I mean, did Seeking Arrangements shut down or something? _Seriously_.”

“Fuck if I know, okay? He and Lotor apparently can’t think of _crowdfunding_ their quirky, bittersweet rom-com movie, so…”

Allura hums pensively. “Perhaps he thinks that it would be a waste of time? As in, he would make a profile and get no responses?”

“It could be that he doesn’t want to go a-sugaring when he’s painfully in love with Keith,” Ryou points out. “Boring explanation, I realize—and given that sugaring doesn’t _need_ to be romantic, it likely has roots in some of Kashi’s… Let’s call them, _mistaken_ ideas about how certain aspects of the world work?” With a sigh, Ryou slumps back in his chair and puts his feet up on the little stool that Allura insisted on them buying. “But devotedly pining over Keith seems like the most probable reason to _me_ for why Kashi would avoid a sugar-dating site.”

“It could be that he’s exhausted with dating sites in general,” Hunk suggests, his voice quiet and his tone resigned. When Keith glances at him, all he does is stare downward and trace his finger in circles around the table. “I mean, just because he has abs now doesn’t mean he’s gonna forget all of the, _‘No fats, no fems, no Asians’_ and, _‘If you’re over two-hundred-fifty pounds, you need not apply’ _shit that he used to see.”

Lance scoffs. “Seriously? One night down at Scandals and I bet you anything, he’ll change his tune.”

“I dunno, man. There’s this regular at our gym, and he was hitting on Shiro _hard_ yesterday morning? I mean, he was smiling at him, and asking to feel his biceps, and leaning in toward him while asking Shiro what kinds of drinks he likes and what he does when he isn’t at the gym, making heart-eyes that you could see from space, the whole nine yards—”

“No, Hunk, please, I beg of you. You’re my best friend, don’t do this to me. _Please_ tell me Shiro took this fine, and got that he was being flirted at, and took the guy’s number even though he doesn’t plan to use it because he was too politely nervous to say, ‘No’ outright—”

“Wish I could, but…” Hunk drags up a sigh from somewhere deep inside his bone marrow and slumps onto his elbows. “After we got back to the car? Shiro burrows into the passenger seat, looking like he’s two steps off from a panic attack, and asks me what that guy’s deal was.”

Groaning as though he’s the one most inconvenienced by this, Lance flops onto the table and pillows his forehead on his arms. “So much for my completely genius plan—”

“The completely _genius_ plan that you just came up with two minutes ago,” Keith deadpans. “And you wanna, what? Put Shiro in one of Lotor’s mesh shirts, drag him to the gay bar when you know he doesn’t like it, and hope that getting laid magically fixes his self-esteem?”

“Yeah! Exactly—”

“You can’t make magic potions out of _semen_, Lance!”

“How do _you_ know? Has literally anybody ever _tried_?” Lance lifts his head again, specifically so he can glare at everybody. “I mean, holy crow, we have a disease that makes people grow symbolic freaking flowers _in their lungs_ because they feel like somebody doesn’t love them back! Why can’t you make magic potions out of jizz!”

On one hand, Lance raises a point so good that, for a moment long enough that it starts hurting, Keith’s brain stops dead in its tracks, struggling to keep firing its bare minimum neurochemical signals, much less process everything that Lance left him to unpack just now.

On the other hand, though, Ryou softly clears his throat, puts his book facedown on his lap, and tells his boyfriend, “If sex were the cure for all of Kashi’s problems? Then he would probably still be with Maurice romantically. Because the incident where he melted down at Super-Weekend because he had that much trouble believing that guys other than Maurice and Lotor were hitting on him genuinely? That never would have happened.”

With a quiet, disgruntled, grumbling noise, Ryou pushes up his glasses. “Then, there’s how much he used to judge himself for sleeping around while he was single. Or for even trying to get laid when he was fat, which? I don’t think that will have _changed_—”

“So, he’s slut-shaming himself. That just means we have to make him stop it, then get him laid, and then he’ll tell Keith how he feels and they’ll be the disgusting make-out kids, and everything will…” Watching Ryou shake his head, Lance trails off into another round of whining. “Why _can’t_ things be that easy, though?”

For a moment, all Keith can do is stare at Lance, trying to get his mind around his friend’s question and the underlying logic.

When he manages to do something else, he can’t make his vocabulary function. He can only make a throaty, pathetic-feeling little noise that sounds a lot like, _“I don’t know.” _Because Lance, unfortunately, has very good points about this—and they’re points that Keith has never even heard proposed before. Which is an unintentional part of Lance’s so-called brand, Keith guesses, but it doesn’t make talking to him any easier, when he gets like this.

Aside from that, though? There’s the potential answer that hangs heavy in the air between Keith and Ryou. Angling his head so he can approximate looking Ryou in the eye, Keith tries to ignore the pang in the back of his neck. This position is uncomfortable as Hell, but right now, Keith _needs_ some kind of visual cue about how they should handle any of this. Between the two of them, they _could_ explain why Shiro has such a hang-up about seeing himself as sexy, much less letting himself enjoy it as much as he’d like. They could explain a part of the problem, at least, and probably enough to clear up several burning questions for their friends.

Except the answer might not be theirs to give. Ignoring propriety and politeness about that could lead to something helpful, but on the other hand, Shiro hasn’t appreciated them telling folks about this before. Even when the folks in question were Aunt Satomi, Naoko, Sven, and Ulaz, he got tense and curt and each time, he wound up hiding in his bedroom as soon as he could break away from everybody else.

When Keith scrunches up his face at Ryou, he doesn’t get any of the cues he’s hoping for. If anything, Ryou looks even more confused than Keith is, with his shoulders drooping and his eyes fixed on the coffee-table without seeing anything. His fingers _tap-tap-tap!_ along his book’s thoroughly creased spine, but the sound is almost too soft for Keith to hear—and he’s over here, right next to Ryou. Not that Keith can blame Ryou for taking this seriously—not when they’re talking about his _brother_, one of the only blood family members he has left—and not that Keith can judge when he’s doing the same thing. Except fretting like this isn’t helping either of them. It might not be helping Shiro, either.

As Keith tries to bite out a verbal question, though, his phone goes _ding!_ down in his pocket. Pulling it out, he finds a text from Zethrid: _[Have you looked at your site’s message boards lately? Like since you posted your latest clip?]_

Keith frowns. It’s not unlike Zethrid to keep tabs on the Akira Crimson message boards—she likes the drama that comes up sometimes, entirely because she finds it completely fucking stupid _and_ she knows the guy who the Internet people get ridiculous about—but usually, she doesn’t let Keith _know_ that she does it. She knows that Keith doesn’t like the drama and she knows that Keith doesn’t understand what the point of it is supposed to be. So, for her to text him about it out of nowhere…?

Although Blue grouses about him not petting her anymore, Keith taps out: _[No. What happened?]_

Keith rests a hand back on Blue’s side and glues his eyes to his phone’s screen. He watches as the little ellipsis pops up, letting him know that Zethrid’s typing at him. But she takes long enough that Allura calls to Keith and asks what’s making him look so perplexed. When Keith doesn’t answer, Lance crows that Keith can’t ignore Allura if he knows what’s good for him, and cuts himself off with a startled yelp. Vaguely, Keith hopes that it’s because Hunk or Allura smacked Lance on the back of the head. Not that he wants Lance to be in pain or anything, but Lance is being annoying at a time when Keith genuinely cannot deal with his hijinks—

Another _ding!_ as Zethrid’s message finally comes through: _[Long story short? Your clients and subscribers think that Shiro is another camboy. Some of them think he’s too skinny to be interesting but most of them think he’s pretty hot. And based on what they’re saying? You might wanna keep him from looking at the boards for the next foreseeable always?]_

At the end, she’s attached five different links. Clicking on the first one and skimming through the comments, Keith can’t help himself from groaning. It feels like he’s always imagined a death-rattle might feel. And he sighs tiredly when Blue bumps his hand off of her. Before he can fully process what the post in the second link is saying, Blue kneads her paws into his pudge. It’s comforting, but not by enough to keep Keith from whining as his brain starts letting him put the comments together in ways that make any kind of sense to him.

_“I’m on a lot of different amateur porn sites and I’ve never seen a guy who looks like that before”…_

_“Maybe he’s just getting started? He could be a friend of Akira’s and Akira’s helping him breakout in the business?”…_

_“Their other friends must be the luckiest bastards in the entire universe, omg??? Look at them. They’re so hot, I’d have perpetual Hanahaki if I were lucky enough to be their friend in real life. How do you think their friends can deal with it?”…_

_“God, the way they look at each other? I bet they’re fucking irl but who can blame them, I wouldn’t kick either of them out of bed if you know what I mean”…_

_“Me neither, lmao. Not unless we were fucking on the floor, y’know what I’m saying!!”…_

He only puts his phone down because Blue invites herself close enough to lick his chin and jawline.

“Ugh, sweetheart, _please_?” Keith sighs. Delicately and taking care not to upset her balance, he ruffles a hand down her spine. This makes her blink down at him and briefly, she lets Keith think that she’s done grooming him, or claiming him as Her Person, or whatever the Hell she thinks she’s doing—but he must go too slack, because she dives right back into licking every piece of his face that she can get at. “Sweetheart, I love you, but… Dammit, Blue, you’re not a freaking _dog_, okay?”

“Most people don’t complain like whiny brats when a cat deigns to like them, Mullet,” Lance grumbles.

Rather than let his boyfriend keep going down that train of thought, Ryou jumps in to say, “Everything okay, Spitfire? And I’m only asking because that would be more polite and hopefully, you’ll take things better if you have more conversational options. Because we can _tell_ that things aren’t okay, but…”

Thank God, Ryou trails off when Keith passes him the phone, still open to the web browser where he opened the message board links.

Words are not a thing that Keith wants to deal with right now. Maybe Ryou isn’t as attuned to Keith’s nonverbal moments as Shiro is, but when he asks if it’s okay to show the others, he gets what Keith means by waving over at the table.

Sighing deeply, Keith waits while Ryou shows off this latest development to Allura, Lance, and Hunk. The four of them chatter amongst themselves, and it’s probably something that Keith should pay attention to. It involves the job that he actually enjoys working—as opposed to his tenure at the bookstore, which he mostly holds onto in case anything should ever happen and cut off his cash-flow from amateur porn. More than that, this incident involves the best friend who Keith’s been hopelessly in love with practically since they first met. Since before he even learned what it feels like when he gets crushes on people and realized that… Well, fuck, he’d been in love Shiro that entire time.

Blue is so much easier to handle than words. So much easier to deal with than trying to speak a human language that sometimes refuses to come to Keith naturally, even though he grew up speaking it at home and allegedly can write things pretty well. As everyone’s voices mash themselves together—not that anyone is talking over anybody else, but Keith’s losing sight of where everyone’s different tones begin and end—Keith keeps himself grounded in actual reality by petting Blue’s sides. Tilting his head at different angles, meeting her when she goes in to lick him. Making throaty little noises back at her because he can’t really purr in the same way that an actual kitten could.

Letting his friends discuss things however they like, Keith doesn’t even chime in to answer Lance’s questions about why Keith didn’t have Shiro cut himself out of the video. They filter in, and Keith sort of understands what Lance is asking? But he can’t get his mind around them well enough to give Lance a response. Anyway, Hunk knows Keith’s rationale well enough—he knows enough to tell Lance, _“He didn’t want Shiro to feel bad for crashing in on the rest of the clip. Especially not when Keith enjoyed having him do that. And he thought that they could turn that last bit into a special, ‘Pay more money and you’ll get something special’ thing. And I mean, he was really into having Shiro touch him”_—and Keith can’t come up with a better explanation, at the moment.

He doesn’t know how long he and Blue stay like that, tuning out the rest of the apartment. But eventually, something thumps on the sofa’s armrest. Whining softly, Keith blinks up at the ceiling, and then at Ryou’s face, hovering above him but only slightly. His expression is gentle, as is the hand that pushes Keith’s bangs off his forehead and brushes through his hair when he nods that it’s okay, and that he doesn’t mind if Ryou touches him. When he asks if Keith’s up for a little chat, Ryou waits for another nod before saying anything else.

“How are _you_ taking this, Spitfire?”

Shrugging is a pretty shitty answer, but it’s all Keith has right now.

Ryou sighs as if maybe he expected that. “For what it’s worth? You did nothing wrong. _Please_ don’t blame yourself for what your clients are saying. That is all on _them_, not you.”

As Blue pads away and curls up on his stomach, Keith gives Ryou a limp, half-hearted groan. Dimly, he hopes that Ryou gets what he means. He won’t get it as well as Shiro does, but maybe Ryou will be able to pick out the sentiment of, _“I know it’s not my fault. But I wanted to do something good for Shiro and then this happened, and I’m already worried about him, and fucking Hell, he doesn’t need to deal with this shit right now.”_

It takes Ryou a moment of silent consideration, but he nods. “Whatever happens with Kashi? That isn’t your fault either,” he says so certainly that he makes Keith believe it, too. Whether or not that’s gonna stick around, Keith has no idea.

But for now, Ryou eases his hand over Keith’s hair and tells him, “I don’t like what these reactions could mean for Kashi, either. But we can’t force his hand. Remember what happened after winter formal? Trying to make him handle everything in the way that we wanted?”

“Could go the rest of my life _never_ thinking about that _again_,” Keith croaks. Forcing the words out of himself, he barely gets his voice to hit a whisper. Probably for the best, with the way that gossip spreads among The Gang. The less that Allura, Lance, and Hunk can hear, the better. “Just glad my dads… Y’know? ‘Sorry I didn’t call, Kolivan, Antok. But I thought Shiro was gonna do something _irreparably _stupid with his Grandfather’s cancer patient painkillers. Curfew kinda slipped my mind.’”

Ryou sighs in something that would be relief if the situation weren’t so overwhelmingly awful. “Thank God your dads understood that.”

“They’re good like that. And they knew he was my best friend. And they knew what Adam’s sister and her douchebag friends pulled off, just…” With a huff, Keith butts his head at Ryou’s palm, the same way that Blue does. Good thing Ryou gets the message and ruffles Keith’s hair again. “I don’t even know where to _start_ telling him about this? But I don’t want him to find out by himself, either?”

“Oh, definitely not. Too many ways things could go wrong very quickly if he…” Shaking his head, Ryou tries to give Keith a smile. He thinks better of it after a moment, which is good, because his fake smiles are even less convincing than his brother’s. “My advice, Keith? Sleep on it. Based on his habits with your message boards, you’ve got time to think things over and decide on the best approach.”

Mussing his long, pudgy fingers through Keith’s bangs, Ryou concludes, “You’re clever. Creative. Sensitive. And you love my idiot genius brother so much that his continued failure to get the message makes me want to cry.” A sigh, and a genuinely hopeful expression. “You’ll figure out the best way to break the news.”

* * *

Keith doesn’t have an opening shift on Monday morning, but he lies about it and goes in early anyway.

For one thing, he goes to bed restless. He wakes up restless after an equally restless sleep. Breakfast feels like something tedious rather than something Keith enjoys. He spends the whole time vibrating with energy that just won’t quit, feeling like the seconds are dragging on and on and on forever, and when Keith’s cleaning up his dishes? He can’t believe that he only spent thirteen minutes on everything, from prep to consumption.

All up, Keith needs to _do something_. Needs to move and make himself useful and get at work on doing _something_. Preferably something that doesn’t involve spending time in the apartment, with the walls hugging him several hairs too tightly.

For another thing, though, it’s way less stressful to bum a ride from Shiro while he’s going into the gym, rather than struggling to avoid staring too much when he gets back. Not that he’s any less beautiful, but his baggy zip-up hoodie, winter coat, and loose sweatpants all hide his body quite effectively. He’s only wearing them because it’s cold, but right now, Keith can’t deal with ogling Shiro. The mere thought of doing that makes the guilt rise in Keith’s throat like heartburn, as if he’d be no better than clients for simply _looking_ at Shiro’s body. As if _appreciating_ Shiro’s body would be an unforgivable sin.

By the time Pidge taps him on the shoulder to ask if he has plans for his lunch-break, Keith’s gotten his nerves and stomach mostly settled. Sure, he pretends to be focused on the true crime books. He glances down at the cart of misplaced books that he’s meant to be reshelving, then over his shoulder at her bedhead and the owlish look that her wire-rim glasses give her eyes.

“I suppose that depends on who’s asking and why,” he says off-handedly. Since he isn’t actually on his break yet, he checks the author on some overwritten conspiracy theory about the Texarkana Moonlight Murders. “Because I’m happy that you’re happy and romantically fulfilled and all? But I don’t wanna watch you and Nyma suck face over lunch.”

Pidge’s eyes don’t entirely glaze over, but her glare still ranks in the top ten most unimpressed expressions that she has ever worn. “So should I tell Prince Shiro von Charming that you aren’t interested, then,” she deadpans, then snickers when Keith perks up. “He’s over by the New Age books and tarot cards. Prince Loser’s skulking around somewhere too, but…”

Keith rolls his eyes. “When is he ever not?”

Snickering fondly, Pidge punches him in the arm. It’s a bit like getting hit by a kitten. “Whatever, dude. Go sweep your man off his feet. Or have him blow you in the back corner stacks. Or whatever it is that you two are into, these days.”

Well, that’s one way of putting things. Knowing Pidge, she’s feeling very pleased with herself for making Keith’s cheeks flush.

Whatever makes her happy, though. As for himself, the New Age stuff hadn’t been the next section on Keith’s list. Fortunately, though, he has a few different tarot decks, a big book of astrology, two books on tasseomancy, and an I-Ching box-set to get back on the shelves before he can let himself take off for lunch. So, if anybody dares to ask, he isn’t wasting work-time on any personal matters. He’s doing his job as usual and Shiro happens to be in his general vicinity.

Wheeling his cart toward Shiro, Keith tries not to look too excited. Probably fails, because he can never control his face when his heart’s fluttering how it is right now—but Keith sets his jaw. Restrains his lips so that they only curl up into a tiny smile. One of the expressions that he saves for Shiro. Doesn’t let himself run to Shiro, makes himself delicately maneuver around customers instead of pushing them aside or asking them to move. He gets so, so close to Shiro—so, so close to making an entrance that comes off as if Keith’s cucumber-cool and entirely unbothered—so, so close to making out like everything’s okay and nothing’s going oddly, at least nothing that affects him and Shiro and their friends, and he certainly does not have any clients yearning to see more of Shiro’s body and wondering if he’s a gainer, too—

And then his hip knocks into a display.

Keith tries to shove through the space between the table and his cart. The little aluminum tubs of bath salts clatter as he bumps into the table. Rattled as the table shakes, they topple toward the floor. Keith dives to catch them—but so does Shiro—at least, it looks like he does—why else would he be leaping? Clenching his eyes shut, Keith braces for impact. Bites his lip, ready for his head to smack into Shiro’s, which must be where reality thinks it’s going with this.

Except Keith only slams into the floor. His hip and stomach hit the carpet. Then, he falls onto his side. Jesus, this is fucking ridiculous. He _cannot _have misjudged the space around him quite so badly. Obviously, he did, or he wouldn’t be on the floor right now—but _goddamn_, Keith’s used to being better than this. As he takes several slow, deep breaths, the sound of Shiro whining as he fails to catch any of the tubs gives Keith his only real consolation. If he had to be a royal screw-up like this, then at least Shiro didn’t show him up and make him feel guilty for putting Shiro in the position to do somebody else’s job.

He should get up and make himself helpful. But Keith doesn’t even opens his eyes until Shiro calls, “Baby? You okay?”

Keith sighs, blinking at the off-white ceiling. “Can you do me a favor and pretend this never happened?”

“I mean, sure, but…” Shiro makes a small, throaty sound like an incredibly perplexed dog. “What, exactly, _did_ just happen?”

_You were watching it_, Keith doesn’t allow himself to say. _How can you possibly need it explained for you?_

Pushing himself up off the floor, Keith holds back on rolling his eyes. Good thing, too. As soon as he’s sitting, he finds himself blinking up at Shiro. In return, Shiro peers down at him, head tilted slightly to the side. He’s leaning in like he wanted to check and make sure Keith was okay—considerate of him, if currently unnecessary. Slumping backward, Keith props himself up on his palms. His shirt rides up ever so slightly on his tummy—and Shiro must notice something when it does, because he blushes like the world’s most adorable strawberry as his eyes trace their way down Keith’s torso—but a sliver of pale chub is nothing to get fussed about.

Well, maybe it is for Shiro, judging by how his eyes seem to have snagged on Keith’s stomach. But Keith’s not bothered by showing off like this. If Shiro wants to check him out—if he wants to stare at Keith’s belly like there’s no way Keith could catch him doing so—then Keith’s not going to complain. At least it’s an improvement on Shiro trying to act like he _isn’t_ staring.

Still, though, Shiro asked a question. Keith forces a sigh by way of getting Shiro’s attention back, then tells him, “What happened is: I’m still _kinda_ getting used to my extra fifty pounds, okay? And I thought I had enough room to get through, then hip-checked the stupid bath salts that we’re selling for God only knows what reason—”

“I mean, _curiosities_ is in the name of the store,” Shiro points out with a soft sigh and a gentle smile. “It’s not as if Barnes and Noble started selling Ben Wa balls and enormous dildos that you could use as door-stoppers.”

“Which Barnes and Noble would never do because they’re boring and they’re bound by Corporate. Unlike Ryner, who owns this place herself and can do whatever she wants. I get it, I know, Pidge and I talked this over when we were setting the stupid table up.” Keith huffs, and despite his mild irritation with the subject in general, he holds out his hand. “My only real point is just? Who is _really_ gonna trust bath salts that they bought at a bookstore instead of at, I don’t know? A bath salts store or something?”

Chuckling, Shiro takes Keith’s hand. “I don’t think there _are_ any exclusive bath salts stores, but? Maybe you missed your calling, Baby. Maybe you could be the first person to open one.”

As far as ideas go, Keith and Shiro have had worse ones than opening a bath salts store.

As far as banter goes, they’re still playing off each other as if Shiro never left, getting on each other’s wavelengths in ways that Keith struggles to get at with anybody else. Moreover, they’re doing it so naturally. It feels like slipping into a hot relaxing bath instead of doing _work_.

As far as everything else goes, though? Keith squeaks as Shiro pulls him up. He doesn’t put any effort in himself, but Shiro tugs Keith to his feet as if it’s really just that easy. Blinking as he tries to get his bearings, Keith looks around them. Doesn’t _mean_ to settle on Shiro’s face—or to _blush_ when Shiro looks down at him with a bemused-looking half-smile—but once Keith’s looking at Shiro, he doesn’t want to look at anybody else. Doesn’t want to acknowledge the rest of the bookstore, that ambient noise around them.

“I, uh… Thanks?” He hates how dry his throat is going. He hates how he can feel that even as his tongue feels like he has peanut butter cementing it to the roof of his mouth. He hates the buzzing sensation in his skull like his entire vocabulary has been replaced by a nest of incredibly angry hornets—but Shiro nods when Keith slips closer to him and lifts a hand.

With that permission, Keith twists his fingers up in Shiro’s white fringe and sighs contentedly. He isn’t even started yet, but feeling up this texture makes Keith’s nerves stop fraying. God, Shiro’s hair is so soft against Keith’s skin. Combing through Shiro’s bangs, he breathes more easily. Manages to make each inhale longer, and slower, and it feels like they count for more. Playing with Shiro’s hair still grounds him, then. Hugging Shiro might’ve changed—it’s still good, but undeniably, it’s different and Keith’s still getting used to it—but at least Keith hasn’t lost the texture-stim of fussing with Shiro’s hair.

“Guess that moment answers the burning question,” Keith says flatly, barely even aware that his mouth is throwing anything out there for him. His brain only catches up at all because Shiro’s blinking at him as though Keith started speaking an obscure dialect of Klingon—and at that, it still feels like Keith’s forming each thought through a fog that’s bearing down on his brain. “Y’know… Getting so strong, and it’s like, ‘Dude, do you even _lift_?’”

Shiro’s cheeks flush pink and he briefly ducks his chin. Wide-eyed, he makes himself look at Keith again, and mutters, “Sorry… Sorry, I didn’t—you can keep stimming with my hair, I don’t mind, that wasn’t—I wasn’t trying to, like—”

“Are you trying to be _adorable_? Because that’s what you’re doing. Or it’s what I’m getting—”

“Yeah, no, I wasn’t really trying to be, like? Definitely not trying for adorable, exactly, but it’s cool that you…” His grin is wobbly, and bashful, and it looks so unsteady that it might as well be Lance after a few too many cocktails. But scratching awkwardly at the back of his neck, Shiro steadies himself enough to say, “I wasn’t really trying to be _anything_, not really? Aside from myself? And helpful? Or as helpful as I could be—d’you want any help picking up the bath salts, by the way?—and I just…”

A deep, trembling breath. A heavy sigh. Then, Shiro gives Keith one of those soft smiles that nobody else ever gets from him. It makes Keith’s heart start flapping and fluttering around his chest again—it’s like a drunk butterfly but going hummingbird-quickly, like he shouldn’t even be able to feel it beating because this poor organ’s going, going, going on, too fast for human beings to comprehend—and there’s no reason for that because he _knows_ how Shiro smiles at him. He _knows_ these feelings too well to be caught off-guard be them.

“But, yeah, uh… Yeah, I even lift? I’ve gotten, like—you’re really not that heavy, I mean?” Arching an eyebrow and smirking at him makes Shiro blush all over again. Makes his shoulders hunch as if he’s trying to keep anyone from seeing him. “I just mean that—yeah, you’ve put on weight? But relative to what I can lift now? If we went out, and you hit a patch of black ice, and you slipped and hurt your ankle, I could… It wouldn’t be that hard for me to, like…”

Shiro quirks his shoulders. “If you didn’t mind? I could totally carry you to get it looked at.”

“Don’t put that idea out there if you don’t wanna keep it up,” Keith says before he can think better of it. But he grins at the pink that flares up on Shiro’s cheeks, just when he managed to calm himself down.

Except that Shiro blushing for him doesn’t exactly point Keith in the direction of something that he say. Shiro doesn’t seem to have any ideas, either—but it’s more understandable, in his case. If Keith’s gonna go yanking the conversational rug out from under Shiro’s feet like this, then he should try to have some kind of road-map in mind, and then stick to it. At least, he should use it as a set of guidelines.

Instead, he comes up with, “So, uh… Can I help you with—what brought you in today?”

“I mean, can I help _you_ with something?” Shiro blinks at Keith and might as well have a buffering bar over his head as he processes what he’s just said. Shaking his head, he bumps his forehead into Keith’s hand. When Keith drops it to his shoulder, Shiro jerks again, and when he’s ready—or when he’s close enough for government work—Shiro says, “I just mean? We kinda… The bath salts?”

“Whatever, I have shit to put back on the shelves anyway—”

“I can still help with them—”

“_You_ didn’t knock them over, though—”

“Okay, yeah, but? I could’ve helped you catch them? But I didn’t? Instead of being, like…” Trailing off, Shiro can’t meet Keith’s eyes. Granted, he has trouble doing that anyway—it’s something to do with his social anxiety, Keith thinks—but it still makes Keith’s heart wriggle guiltily. If he’s doing something to make Shiro uncomfortable—if anything about this situation doesn’t feel as good for Shiro as it does for Keith—then he wants to fix that.

At least when Keith tucks the white fringe behind his ear, Shiro leans toward his hand. Maybe Keith’s reading too much into things?

“It’s okay, Shiro,” he promises, giving him a smile and cupping his hand on Shiro’s face. “You didn’t do anything wrong, and you don’t need to worry about the display. You’ll probably stress yourself out in organizing it all anyway, so…” He brushes his thumb over the apple of Shiro’s cheek. “I’ll clean it up. You don’t need to do anything.”

Shiro nods, but for a long moment, refuses to get back to the question Keith actually asked him. In near-perfect silence—punctuated only by the white noise of customers bustling around the store and Shiro periodically sighing—he leans into Keith’s touch and rubs his cheek against Keith’s palm. He turns his face, getting his lips closer and closer to Keith’s skin. He could kiss Keith, if he wanted. Keith wouldn’t mind that. His entire body feels like it’s trembling with desire, like he’s sitting on pins and needles that have electric currents shocking through them, waiting for Shiro to kiss him like he’s silently kinda sorta expressing interest in—

Then Shiro huffs a bit and says, “Did you _forget_ anything this morning?”

There’s an impish glimmer in his eyes that leaves Keith with only one real answer: “Well, you obviously think I did, but…?” He makes a noise like _“I don’t know” _because he doesn’t. And before he can think better of it, his mouth adds on, “You don’t need to invent reasons to come visit me at work, y’know. As long as me and Pidge still get our jobs done, Ryner likes having you around—”

“You mean she _used_ to—”

“Like Ryner’s gonna change her opinion of you just because you have abs, now.”

“I don’t know? Pidge told me not to be too much of a distraction—”

“That’s—she probably didn’t mean that how it sounded.” Keith huffs and blows his bangs off his forehead. When they flop back down, Shiro pushes them aside for him. “Look, Nyma was joking earlier? About how having you around could help. Like, lure people with the perfectly sculpted hottie, then get them to become customers—”

“That isn’t—I mean, that wouldn’t—I am_ so_ not perfectly sculpted, like? Why would she even say something like that, it doesn’t make any…”

As Shiro babbles, his half-finished thoughts get harder to follow. When Keith tucks his black bangs behind his ear, all Shiro manages to do is sigh as if he’s stuck on something that won’t make any sense, no matter how he tries to get his mind around it. Keith scrunches up his face. Maybe he should wait for permission? Maybe he should ask because Shiro might not want to be touched too much more?

But Shiro’s giving off an air that makes Keith’s nerves stand at attention. They don’t make him shiver, but that would be better than feeling like maybe his nerves are dead, every single one throughout his body. This kind of feeling from Shiro—he never _means_ to give it off? But when he _does_, it is literally never good. It means that he needs something and won’t allow himself to ask for it.

Inhaling sharply, Keith snakes his arms around Shiro and yanks him into a tight hug. While Shiro squeaks above him, Keith simply tugs himself in closer, presses his soft, pudgy belly against Shiro’s firm, hard-won muscle. No, it definitely is not the same as squishing himself into the warm paunch that Shiro had before—not least because Keith gets his arms all the way around Shiro’s middle without any kind of struggle—and Shiro’s abs don’t let Keith get lost in this embrace, the way that Shiro’s big, plush belly used to do.

These new hugs aren’t without their upsides, though. It takes Shiro a moment to return Keith’s hug—and something bumps against his back when Shiro does—but God, his arms are so much stronger. They can put so much more into holding Keith. Into pressing him close and squeezing Keith. Bearing down on him like the human version of a weighted blanket. Even though they’re out in public, Keith rocks his hips against Shiro’s. Kneads against him with a deep sigh. It’s not a moan, exactly? But Keith wouldn’t blame anybody for getting a mite confused. If he looked up at Shiro’s face right now, maybe he’d catch the beautiful idiot blushing all over again as though he really doesn’t understand why people think he’s beautiful.

He didn’t understand it before, either. But losing weight, the way he’s wanted for so long? Getting the abs that he’s wanted since before he first started getting chubby? Since before Keith even met him, according to his brother? God, Lance hasn’t been wrong in saying that Shiro looks like he could be a model now. How could he _possibly_ miss the reasons why people think he’s gorgeous?

“Nyma was only joking, okay,” Keith whispers, after a few moments of simply holding Shiro and being held. “We’re talking about a girl whose idea of a practical joke? Is handcuffing Lance to a tree in the middle of the quad and leaving him there. For _three-and-a-half hours_—”

“Thank God you cared enough to get him out of that—”

“He would’ve been _fine_ if he’d remembered to use his phone as an actual _phone_.”

“Okay, point taken? But still, no one else stopped to… I mean, but—”

“But _nothing_.” Pouting more than he likes, Keith sets his jaw. He can _feel_ his face getting increasingly unimpressed with Shiro and his insistence on defending his brother’s boyfriend. “If Lance had thought about calling or texting someone instead of browsing Instagram? He would’ve gotten rescued _before_ I had to fucking call him. _Before_ me and Hunk and Allura all thought he was skipping out on our group project to suck some hot person’s face.”

All Shiro does is chuckle and rub Keith’s back. “He’s also incredibly lucky to have a friend who can pick locks so well.”

“I’m just saying, Pretty Boy. Don’t take anything that Nyma said seriously. She doesn’t really want to make you, like… The hot dude version of someone handing out coupons in a chicken suit. Or whatever.” Squeezing Shiro tightly, Keith nuzzles at his chest. “She’s right about you looking good. But you don’t have to do anything that you’re uncomfortable with.”

“Pretty sure I _do _need to stop hugging you eventually,” Shiro says as though this connection makes perfect sense to anyone but him. When Shiro only gets a bemused noise out of Keith, he shrugs. “It would make me uncomfortable? Because I don’t want to stop hugging you? But I have to let go eventually, I assume? Like, even if you weren’t on a shift right now? You’d probably need to go to the restroom, at some point—”

“Okay, okay, I get it.” Keith only edges back enough to look up at Shiro without straining his neck too terribly. “But I just meant, like? You don’t need to worry about Nyma’s stupid idea. Or anything like that. Because you don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to.”

The biggest potential snag in this approach comes from the Akira Crimson message boards. If he gets tense and tightly wound from simply hearing that _Nyma_ thinks he’s hot? If he gets like that when Nyma is one of their friends, even if Shiro is closer to Pidge than to her girlfriend? Then Keith doesn’t even want to know how Shiro might get from finding the message boards without a warning.

In the meantime, though, Keith whines as Shiro pulls away. He shuts up when Shiro holds up one hand—but only because he finds himself blinking at his lunchbox. It’s bright red, like most of Keith’s personal effects, and it’s rectangular, and according to the tag back when he bought it, it’s designed to perfectly regulate the temperature of whatever anyone puts into it. All of that makes perfect sense and hasn’t changed at all.

The way that it’s hovering in front of Keith right now, hanging on its black handle? This is making Keith’s brain skid out a little, as if he hit a patch of ice while doing twenty-over on I-95 and then the brakes locked up. It takes him far too long to notice the hand that’s keeping the lunchbox up, much less that it’s attached to an arm. When Keith traces his eyes up to an elbow, and a shoulder, and finally, to Shiro’s even smile, it still takes another moment for things to really click.

As he’s getting his thoughts together, Shiro’s face falls. “You didn’t have plans, did you?”

“No, shit, wait—no, God, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, like…” Keith sighs and shakes his head. “I didn’t even realize I’d left without one?”

Now that he thinks about it, Keith _should_ have noticed. He ditched his coat and hoodie in the employee break-room, and he can’t remember putting anything on the unofficial Lunchbox Counter or stashing food inside the fridge. The closest he got to either location was grabbing some paper towel for his Hanahaki coughing before he darted back out to the floor.

All Shiro does by way of a response? Is shrug and tell Keith, “You seemed pretty distracted this morning, yeah? But in fairness, I didn’t notice that you’d gone without until I got back from the gym—”

“It’s not your lunch, though. Nobody could blame you for that.” Giving Shiro a small smile, he adds, “Thanks for thinking of me, Kashi.”

When he peers into the lunchbox, Keith expects to find a sandwich and a drink. Maybe some fruit, if Shiro’s going to be a healthy kick while letting Keith get chubby. Maybe some cookies or a brownie, if he’s going to enable Keith in gaining weight, the way he doesn’t want to admit he’s into. Certainly nothing fancy, though, because it’s one thing for Shiro to say that he learned how to cook in California and is no longer a menace in the kitchen—but it’s quite another thing for him to prove it. Considering Keith’s only seen Shiro put together salads and eggs so far, he’s pretty sure nobody would blame him for being wary.

Underneath an apple, a can of Cherry Coke, and two ziplock bags of Oreos, Keith finds not one but two containers, stacked on top of each other. He probably shouldn’t ferret around in the lunch that Shiro made him while Shiro is standing here. There’s probably some unwritten rule about this being impolite. But Shiro’s grinning bashfully when Keith digs out top container. As Keith gets his head around what he’s seeing—shell pasta pushing up against the clear plastic walls, drenched in a very yellow-looking sauce—Shiro watches him eagerly, as if the universe is hanging on a thread before him and the thread is Keith’s reaction.

“Did…” Keith squints at the bottom of the container, at the mass of noodles that he sees there. “Did you _make_ this?”

Nodding, Shiro rocks on the balls of his feet. “I mean, I didn’t come up with the recipe, I _found_ it? But I had to augment it somewhat, ‘cause we didn’t have all the ingredients, and I had more pasta than I thought I would? But Lotor documented it on his Instagram—”

“You made me macaroni and cheese for lunch?” Keith feels kind of stupid, saying it again. But that’s nothing, compared to the pang that twists around his lungs, watching Shiro nod slowly and frown as if he’s worried. “Oh my _God_, Shiro—_Kashi_—you didn’t need to do this—I mean, even with? Even just bringing me anything would’ve been enough? But doing this was—”

“I _wanted_ to cook for you, alright? It won’t be as good as Hunk’s—”

“Like I _care_?” Keith furrows his brow and pouts at Shiro. “You made it _for me_. Specifically.”

“I think you’d care if I made it _badly_—”

“Maybe, but? You made me your former favorite food—”

“It’s _still _my favorite, just…” Quirking his shoulders and scratching the back of his neck, Shiro gives Keith another wobbly-seeming smile. How can he look so beautiful while also looking like he wants to cry? “Sorry, I guess I’m sensitive about that? But it’s not that I _stopped_ liking certain foods? But I don’t eat them so much anymore…”

There’s so much that Keith could respond to here—but all he manages to say is, “You don’t even let yourself have cheat days?”

“I mean, I do, they’re part of the balance thing, but… Sparingly? And not with some foods? Pretty much the way I’ve said?”

“I dunno… That sounds like a pretty unsatisfying way to live.”

Ducking his chin as if that hides him from anybody, Shiro makes a noncommittal noise. “It has its ups and down like anything, I guess? Can’t argue with the results, though—or anyway, I like the results? Even if nobody else does—”

“People like the results,” Keith tells him. God, he can hear his heartbeat, and there’s no way that Shiro could miss it. Especially not when they’re so close to each other. “I like the results, okay? What matters is that you’re happy, and since you are…”

All the thoughts racketing around Keith’s skull stop dead under Shiro’s grateful smile. He _knows_ that he has more to say, but—

“Have you looked at the message boards yet? Like, since you posted the new clip?”

Shiro blinks at him, shakes his head. “Lotor and I were gonna do that over lunch—”

“A lot of them are about you,” Keith blurts out. “About how much my clients? They really like you?” When all Shiro does is squeak at him, Keith adds on, “They think you’re another camboy? And they don’t like the belly rub as much as I did, but they _do_ like—”

“God, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have rushed in that—”

“_Come on_, Shiro. I liked having you do that. It was _good_, okay? I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to, like, do it again literally ever, if…”

His stomach twists guiltily as Shiro gets an expression like he might be sick. Or run screaming and hide in his bedroom (if Keith is incredibly lucky and Shiro doesn’t do something stupid). Or bury his face in Keith’s hair while trying not to scream. Jesus, he’s jerking Shiro around so badly. He has to get this out there. Needs to get _something_ out there, before Shiro decides that Keith is angry with him or whatever’s going on inside his head. There are so many possibilities here, each one increasingly worse than its predecessors. Keith needs to say _something_, and Ryou believed in him so much, in his ability to find a good way to break this news to Shiro—

“Would you…” Keith’s voice trembles, but he makes himself look Shiro in the eye. “D’you want to… Do porn with me, Shiro? _Please_?”

As Shiro’s lips purse so tightly that it has to hurt and his eyes nearly double in size, Keith can’t keep his heart from sinking. There are so many potential outcomes here, and Keith might have done better than saying absolutely nothing—but even so? A sense of grim, impending doom brushes its talons up the back of his neck and leaves Keith feeling like maybe silence would’ve been the best choice, after all.


	9. Chapter 9

“Oh, that is just…” Lotor starts off drawling, but quickly slips into a cringe instead. “Comments like that make me fear for our entire species.”

With a sigh, Shiro drops his elbows onto their table at Sal’s. Propping himself up on them, he watches Lotor as if there’s a secret code to be picked out, underlying all of his behaviors. There likely isn’t—ostensibly, all Lotor’s doing is using the diner’s Wifi and his tablet to click around Keith’s message boards, skimming the reactions that people have had to Keith’s latest clip—but Lotor has so many layers to him and so many layers to his actions? As Shiro slouches and whines at him impatiently, he can’t help feeling like there _must_ be something else that’s going on for Lotor. Something else that he means to say but won’t come out with.

Yet, all he does is quirk his shoulders. “What do you want me to say, darling? I take _innumerable_ issues with most of Keith’s clients who have so far commented about the mystery man in his last clip. Not that I disagree with them about your beauty, but—”

“But you know what I looked like before and liked it better. Yes, I know.” Sighing, Shiro lets his head hang. Probably, he’s making himself look pathetic, but right about now, he has bigger things to care about. “Would it kill you to let me read them for myself, though?”

Lotor hums, and Shiro can’t tell if he’s considering the question genuinely or not. His answer doesn’t help, either: “I doubt that it would literally kill me. But I might not enjoy it very much. This may not be getting to the same level as comments sections on _Youtube_, but—”

“I still want to know what they’re saying about me, though!”

He must mash on the right button, because on the other side of a deep sigh, Lotor reads off his pad, “_‘This guy looks like an Asian Captain America’_—”

“Oh, I…” Squirming, Shiro tried to sit up slightly straighter. “That one’s kinda nice, really—”

“_‘Why are they keeping him wrapped up in that t-shirt and those pajamas? A body like that, he should be flaunting what he’s got’_—”

“That one isn’t _too_ much on the… It’s kind of—”

“_‘I hope he sticks around. He could top Akira into the whatever flat surface they want’—_”

“Oh, that’s… I mean…” Shiro’s cheeks flush warm. Under Lotor’s arched eyebrow and the chilly scrutiny of his gaze, Shiro ducks his chin.

“This is a direct response to that one.” Lotor deadpans, “_‘Oh, no. Not with the way he kneels for Akira. That boy is a total bottom’_—”

“I mean, they aren’t _wrong_—”

“Darling, if you were only allowed to bottom, both of us know that you would grow terribly bored and begin sabotaging your sexual fulfillment.” With a huff, Lotor curls his lips into something that wants to be a smile but can’t commit to anything. “Shall I go on? Much of it is the same tedious nonsense. There are, however, a few lengthy manifestos about what delights you might be concealing under your clothes.”

Sighing softly, Shiro shakes his head. He’s heard enough. He should have something more to say now. After all, he coaxed Lotor into reading some of the comments, and Shiro _wanted_ to learn what they said. Stands to reason, then, that he should have something to say about this knowledge. Even a _“thank you”_ would be a good start.

For a long moment, though, sipping through his straw is all Shiro has it in him to do. Sadly, the cold water does nothing to clear up the way Shiro’s head feels like it’s getting smothered in a swamp made out of conflicted emotions. If he needed to control his breathing—if he felt his ribs closing in around his lungs, the way that he does around a panic attack or some of the Hanahaki coughs that he’s dealt with in the past week—Shiro might feel slightly better. He wouldn’t _enjoy_ it, no. But he’d have a purpose, albeit a temporary one, and with it, something to do with himself. He’d need to find something _real_ about this moment he could cling to.

In lieu of that, Shiro doesn’t come up with words when Lotor gently kicks his ankle. He barely even comes up with a discontented grumble.

Sighing softly, Lotor prods him with, “What are you thinking, darling? Or feeling? Or both, if you like?”

Grinding his thumb into his nose doesn’t make Shiro feel any less bogged down in the morass of this situation. Still, it does help him get through saying, “I don’t know, confused? A little bit lost? Like, I can’t believe that this is even happening—”

“Whyever not? To clarify: I can _guess_ why not, with you, but…” Lotor folds his arms over his chest. “In your own words, please?”

“It just doesn’t make any _sense_ to me, okay? For one thing, I messed up—”

“Based on what you’ve told me? I think Keith disagrees—”

“For another thing, though? Just?” God, Shiro wishes he had a better way to say this. Or at least one that was less likely to make Lotor get godawful frustrated with him. “I keep hearing that I look good now—”

“You looked good _before_, as well—”

“But I didn’t _feel_ good before. And people who already love me were the only ones saying that I looked okay. But now, it’s different, and I don’t…” He sighs and drops his gaze to the table. Spins a discarded straw wrapper in his fingers. “It’s like… Sure, the Ugly Duckling grew up to be a gorgeous swan, and he got all kinds of revenge on the other animals who made his life a living Hell—”

“_Please_ don’t tell me that you are obsessing over your ten-year high school reunion like some kind of—”

Shiro shakes his head. “There isn’t enough money in the _world_ for me to go to that fiasco willingly. Abs or no abs, and no matter how I look, now.” Which is an easier sentiment to get his mouth around than, “But why doesn’t anybody ever talk about, I don’t know, like? The Ugly Duckling still not _feeling_ beautiful. Or not knowing what to do with himself now that he’s a swan because he grew up thinking he was a duck, and judging himself by the beauty standards of the other ducks—”

“_Darling_.” Lotor toes at Shiro’s ankle with a bit too much force to call it _“gentle,”_ but not enough to hurt. “Have you discussed any of this with Ulaz. Because this sounds like an inordinate amount of thought to put into a fairy tale, even when you use it as a form of self-examination.”

Nodding, Shiro pushes his white fringe back off his face. “I mean, we’ve only had one session so far, but…” He huffs and can’t fight off the impulse to roll his eyes. “It was one of the first things we got to, after the, ‘How was California, I can’t help but notice that you have lost weight and are no longer a completely enormous fat-ass who could pull small moons’—”

“Finish that insult and I kick you in the groin.” Lotor’s eyes flash in a way that does not give Shiro room to think his ex is kidding. He waits until Shiro apologizes and nods in understanding, then tells him, “Correct me if I’m wrong—which I do not expect, but in case I am? Is the self-named Ugly Duckling in this scenario—”

“Come on, Lotor. We both know who I mean by that—”

“I was trying to respect the distance that you attempted to put between yourself and your feelings—”

“You don’t need to. Just… Don’t do the coy thing, please? It’s not helpful, and you don’t like doing it—”

“I enjoy doing it _sometimes_. When the matter at hand is not quite so…” Lotor trails off and sniffs without finding the word that he wants or trying to describe it better. With a flip of his cowlick, he says, “Are you saying that you truly do not understand why people find you so beautiful? After all of the effort that you put into reshaping yourself until you fit those restrictive ideas of what does or does not constitute beauty? Can you honestly look at yourself now, see the body that you worked so hard to get, and _not_ see why other people—aside from those of us who, as you said, already love you—find you good-looking?”

As his brain skids to a halt, Shiro sighs and allows himself to slouch. It takes him more time than he likes to admit, “That’s not… That isn’t… I’m not trying to get out of giving you a real answer? But I wasn’t expecting you to ask me _that_, exactly?”

Perching his chin on his palm, Lotor leans toward Shiro. If not for Shiro reaching over to move Lotor’s glass, he would knock his fruit smoothie all over the table—including his tablet and the new journal that he decided to get himself while they were at the bookstore. Sure, he isn’t wearing the expression that usually accompanies Lotor acting like the spider beckoning flies into her parlor, but right now? That might be preferable to the bemused concern that crinkles up Lotor’s forehead, scrunches up his nose, and makes him pull his lips so tight that Shiro nearly loses sight of them. With a deep breath, he tries to make himself sit up a little straighter, tries to ignore the skin-crawl wriggling all over the back of his neck and look Lotor in the eye.

“…D’you want me to say something else?” Shiro prods, after a long moment of silence between them.

Lotor gives Shiro a pensive hum. “That won’t be necessary, darling. I am merely considering the situation, your behavior, and what I wish to ask you next.” Which would be enough for Shiro, but he’s grateful when Lotor adds, “I apologize if I am currently making you feel uncomfortable, though.”

“Eh? If it were someone else—except for Keith or Ryou, maybe Hunk—then yeah, I would be? But… Since it’s _you_, and since I _trust_ you…”

“You honor me, _migadi_,” Lotor says as though he really means it. As though he _isn’t_ simply being Extra, as he does so often. As though he means every syllable of that Galran endearment—a non-romantic endearment, but Lotor once told Shiro that it refers to someone who shares a piece of your soul and whom you _choose_ to integrate into your life, _choose_ to stand beside and fight for, and _choose_ to welcome into your inner circle, rewarding them with privileged glimpses of you and your heart that most people could never even dream of getting.

Dimly, Shiro wants to kick himself for remotely questioning whether or not Lotor means that endearment or the sentiment behind it. Of course he means it. He’s meant it every time that he’s used it for Shiro. Aside from that, the only other people he’s applied it to have been Acxa and Zethrid. There ought to be no question in Shiro’s mind about whether or not Lotor is telling the truth in using the word _“migadi” _to address him.

Thankfully, Lotor doesn’t spend too much time pondering before cutting in to save Shiro from the rabbit hole of his own doubts: “I may not understand your current experience in the same terms as you do, since I have never been overweight. However, I _do_ recall how difficult it was, after I finally secured my disowning, for me to adjust to life without my parents breathing down the back of my neck. I can understand that you might have trouble with coming to see yourself in a new light, even after all of the time and work that it took for you to accomplish this goal…”

_I don’t think those situations are _**_really _**_as comparable as you’re saying_, Shiro keeps to himself, fighting off the urge to sigh. _You had actual reason to be upset in that situation. You were adjusting to a change that wasn’t as outright _**_good_**_ for you as the rest of us felt it should’ve been. It wasn’t like you could just forget about loving your parents, or your brother—_

“I am not trying to come from a place of judgment or condemnation,” Lotor says carefully, tilting his head like a curious bird and speaking as if his words are tiptoeing through a field of landmines. “What concerns me about this situation? And what I wish to ask after is simply…” A sigh. A moment of drumming his fingertips along his cheek. A huff, and then Lotor decides to dive in headlong: “Were you understating how much you care about your looks? Or how much of a factor they were in you wanting to lose weight?”

As much as Shiro feels like interjecting, his mouth and throat go dry—if they stay this way, then he could too easily forget how they’re supposed to feel—and this keeps him silent as Lotor asks, “Or was there something else in play for you?”

“Of course there was something else in play for me, I’m like?” Shiro splutters and reaches for his water. He downs several long sips, tries to breathe more deeply and pull himself back into something that could pass for calm. “Fine, yes. I cared about my looks. That was always part of this, I admitted it _back then_, but… Even more than that was, like… I wasn’t lying about how they were just a _fraction_ of something bigger…”

He slouches again and drops his eyes to the table. His head feels so heavy and his skull feels a few hairs too tight for his brain, like there’s a volcano’s worth of pressure building up inside of him and waiting to explode. Like any minute now, a goddess will crack open his forehead and spring forth, fully formed. At least Lotor gives Shiro something real to cling onto, batting gently at his ankle and reassuring him that he can take as much time as he needs.

“What do I have to do,” Shiro mutters, “to make people get that I was serious about not feeling good like that?”

Considering that question, Lotor slumps back into his side of the booth. “I don’t think that anyone doubts you about this? They simply fear that your definition of ‘feeling bad’ or ‘feeling good’ or ‘not feeling good’? _Might _have been overly tied up in your physical appearance.”

Shiro wants to bite out a response as soon as Lotor says that. But he holds back. With all of the energy Lotor’s putting into thinking about any concerns that Shiro brings up with him? Shiro owes his friend that same kind of effort.

“I don’t think you guys are _wrong_ about that—or not entirely, anyway,” he admits, after a long enough silence that Shay comes over to refill their water. “I mean, I _wish_ that you were wrong? Like, I wish that my intentions in all this had been completely pure—”

“No one’s intentions in anything are _ever_ entirely pure,” Lotor drawls. “Besides, you are only human. Wanting to feel attractive and sexually desirable—or wishing for more people to think that you are those things—that is…” He taps on the table and flips his cowlick back again. “I may not enjoy how much credence you give to the opinions of people who do not matter—”

“Yeah, the lion should not concern himself with the opinions of sheep. Right, milord?”

“Darling, _please_. If you absolutely _must_ involve Westeros in this, then at least cast me properly. I am a _Targaryen_, not a Lannister—”

“Oh, of course. My apologies. How could I ever forget—”

“I may not enjoy how much you consider the opinions of people who should not matter to you.” Lotor’s eyes flash with an unspoken dare like,_ “Go on, punk. Interrupt me again. Try it and see what happens”_—which effectively deters Shiro from speaking while Lotor tells him, “That said: I understand how important it can be to feel as though someone wants you. And I understand that, for someone who has never been _allowed_ by others to feel that he has any manner of physical beauty? This would have been more important to you than some of us have accounted for. Would you agree with that?”

“See, I feel like you guys _have _accounted for it? We just have very different conclusions about it—”

“Yes. Because we haven’t properly considered what being deemed beautiful might mean to you, in light of what you have previously experienced—”

“That doesn’t mean you’re wrong about that exactly, though—”

“_What I mean to ask you is_…” Lotor gives Shiro that Pointed Look again. The one that warns Shiro not to pop off at the mouth until Lotor is done speaking his piece for real. “What I mean to ask about is less concerned with…” Another false start leads into another heavy sigh, and Lotor shakes his head. Grumbles in Galra and frustration with himself and his currently debatable grasp on his own vocabulary.

Then, he spits out, “Your concern always seemed to lie primarily with the fact that you felt ugly and unattractive. Even in your journals, you wrote in terms that struck _me_ as being more about your appearance than anything—”

“One of the downsides to snooping? You don’t bother asking me anything or checking your assumptions—”

“That is currently immaterial to this discussion. We can address your distaste for my inquisitiveness _later_, if you wish—”

“I don’t think I have anything to say that you haven’t already refused to listen to—”

“My biggest underlying question is…” Another flash of those blue eyes comes with arched eyebrows—but that expression would count for more if Lotor would make good on these unspoken threats. “How do _you_ define your sense of ‘feeling good’ or ‘feeling bad’ or whichever you’d feel most comfortable discussing with me, at the moment?”

“I don’t really feel comfortable discussing _any_ of it,” Shiro grouses, combing his fingers through his white fringe. Still, Lotor is putting in the effort right now—moreover, he’s doing it for Shiro’s sake, first and foremost—and Shiro owes him the same level of consideration. “I mean, sure. My looks were part of it. I hated how I looked. But then there was the stuff like… Getting winded walking up the stairs. Getting exhausted with the treadmill on its lowest setting. Having so little energy in the first place that even doing _that_ stuff at the gym felt like it was asking way too much and like antidepressants didn’t help. Not being able to _legitimately run_ without my knees aching and my whole body bouncing and jiggling and shaking until I felt like I’d get physically sick…”

Sighing softly, Shiro drops his cheek into his palm. At the moment, it’s the only thing keeping himself from face-planting on the table. After another round of silent consideration, he adds, “But then there were things that went deeper than that, too?”

Shiro must go quiet for too long. For one thing, Lotor starts coughing at him, trying to clear his throat without being too obvious about it—which he somewhat fails at, but it’s endearing, for the most part. Another example of Lotor being perfectly adorable, no matter how much he wants people to believe that he’s a cold, hard bitch.

For another thing, though, Shay comes over with Shiro’s chicken-and-strawberry salad and Lotor’s grilled chicken BLT wrap. She has enough time to give Lotor a wink and say that the chef sends his regards. As Lotor hacks up into a plastic bag from Stop-N-Shop, Shiro prods at his dressing-free lettuce leaves and tries to come up with the words that he wants. No easy feat while Lotor is busy, getting another round of yellow iris petals out of his lungs. Even so, when Lotor’s finished, Shiro feels like he has a decent enough idea.

Maybe. He hopes.

With Lotor’s permission to carry on, Shiro shrugs and tells him, “This might sound ridiculous? Or like it’s really no big deal and I shouldn’t be bothered with it? But part of the thing for me was, just? Not feeling at home in my body?”

At least Lotor thinks about this before supposing that he doesn’t know what Shiro means.

“To use the Ugly Duckling idea again? He was actually a swan the whole time. But he thought he was a duck until he grew up, and…” Shiro quirks his shoulders and drags his hand through his white fringe. He doesn’t tug on it, lest Lotor decide that he’s doing worse than Shiro thinks he is—but at least his nerves somewhat settle down. “What if he never felt right with being called a duck? Maybe he somehow _knew_ that it wasn’t true. But then what if being a _swan_ doesn’t—”

“Are you _seriously _suggesting a trans-species interpretation of the Ugly Duckling?”

The way that Lotor scrunches up his face all but outright begs Shiro to please, please, _please_ suggest something else. He seems to say, _“Anything but a trans-species reading of that fairy tale’s lead character, darling. I cannot deal with such things this afternoon.”_

“That’s not _exactly_ what I want to get at—”

“Oh, thank God—”

“So, maybe I wasn’t explaining it right, but…” Shiro sighs softly and slumps back onto his elbows. “Like, before I did all this? I thought that I would… I thought that my only problem with my body was being fat? Not feeling like I belong in my own skin because people keep telling me that I’m hideous. Or worse, saying _nothing_ but still treating me like garbage. Glaring at me for eating. For using the escalator at the mall. For being at the mall in the first place, like how dare fat people exist in public, what was I _thinking_. For getting on public transportation. For taking up a seat on the bus—do you have any idea how many times I stood up just so people would _maybe_ stare at me a little less… And then I can’t call them out because they aren’t _saying_ anything and it could all be in my head…”

Although Lotor says nothing when Shiro trails off, he speaks volumes with the gentle way he strokes his foot up Shiro’s calf.

Whatever Lotor’s going for, he gives Shiro enough strength to get through saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, though? Because I changed all of that, right? I can see that—and I feel it when I touch my body—but I don’t feel it on the _inside_, y’know? It feels like I’ve got _something _that isn’t right inside of me? Like, my skin doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to the dumb, sad fat kid that I spent most of my life being? But _before_ I lost the weight, it felt like my body was this… Disgusting, heavy, hideous _thing_. Like it was some _parasite_ that was holding me back, and until I got rid of it, I’d never even feel like _myself_, never mind feeling like my body is _mine_?”

Shiro slouches and burrows into the booth’s cushion. Letting his legs fall wherever they like, he tries not to knock them too hard into Lotor’s. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “I’m trying my best to, y’know, get this out? I know that this doesn’t make any sense—I mean it definitely doesn’t make any to me, most of the time? And I’ve never really put so many words on all of this before—”

“I would distinctly recall seeing such thoughts in your journals if you had, darling—”

“But I thought it was the weight thing? And the being fat thing? And how much I hated being fat? Because I felt like…” Shiro must look pitiful as he quirks his shoulders and keeps whining. “Why _wouldn’t _it be about my weight? There were enough things I hated about being so big that _weren’t_ related to what other people thought of me. I hated carrying around all that blubber more than I hated how it looked—and yes, I hated how it looked _so much_. So, of _course_ it’s easy to pick on my being fat and be like, ‘Oh, that’s it. That’s the problem’…”

Groaning softly, Shiro buries his face in his hand. Rubs his palm over his nose and digs his fingertips at the apple of his cheek. “But then I _changed_ that. I fought _so hard_ to learn better habits and take care of myself better. I did _every_ workbook sheet for Dr. Hall, _every_ exercise log for Dr. Carter, _every_ food diary, and I did them all, even when I didn’t want to. Like you’ve said however many times? I _literally_ worked my ass off to slim down, and those feelings haven’t gotten _any better_ for me. I can see my toes, and buy normal sized clothes, and I wouldn’t need to move my belly out of the way if anybody actually wanted to sleep with me—but it doesn’t make a difference to how I feel. I have the abs I’ve always _wanted_ but I’m still so…”

“Incredibly uncomfortable in your own skin?” Lotor suggests, after Shiro’s apparently gone too quiet. “Uncomfortable with people seeing you—”

“Uncomfortable, sure, but it’s more like my body feels like it isn’t really _mine_? Like it’s a place where I live, but it’s not where I _belong_? And like people can tell that I’m not _right_? In some ways that don’t even make any logical sense, or…” God, Shiro could kick the English language for being so godawful frustrating. If it had a physical form, anyway. “Or I guess I feel disconnected from my body, maybe? From myself? Or maybe that’s not the word I want the most, or I’m not entirely—”

Lotor holds up a hand as he’s thinking something over. He keeps it in place as he says, “I have never heard of anything _exactly_ like what you are describing, darling. That ignorance on my part does not mean that you are alone in experiencing whatever this is—”

“I’ve been meaning to look it up online—”

“Don’t do that.” Lotor snaps his thumb and fingers together, gesturing like his hand is saying, _“Blah, blah, blah, blaaaaaah.” _But he doesn’t wait for Shiro to confirm that he understands. “Knowing you, looking this up on your own might end with you spending four hours on WebMD and deciding that you are literally dying. As opposed to your recurring, emotionally hyperbolic nonsense, which is infinitely easier to handle.”

Slipping his cowlick behind his ear, Lotor sighs. “With my lack of easily accessible answers acknowledged, however? I may have a theory—”

“Anything is better than nothing—”

“If I were to misdiagnose your current malady? If I put ideas into your head that turned out to be false and did you harm? Then I would surely be within my rights to disagree with that assessment.”

“You not knowing what’s up exactly—Just because you don’t know for certain—Seriously, even a wrong idea could put us on the right track, yeah? If we bat it around a little, and get brainstorming—If we try pulling whatever threads we can find—”

“Your Hanahaki, darling,” Lotor snaps. He blushes bright pink, realizing that he might have gotten a bit louder than was necessary—but with a slight shake of his head, he presses on, “I realize that this notion might sound ridiculous? Surely, it is more far-fetched than most things I would ever suggest to you. However, last I checked? It is not unheard of for Hanahaki disease to distort one’s sense of self-perception—”

“_Maybe_,” Shiro grouses. “Maybe as in, like… People getting so high on feeling like their love is unrequited, and they can’t even consider…” Under the scrutiny of Lotor’s narrowed eyes, Shiro groans and tips his head back. Lets it droop into the cushion behind him. “I _don’t_ mean like me and how I feel about Keith—”

“Truly? Because it certainly sounds as though you are discussing—”

“I mean the cases that go beyond that point, y’know? Like, the ones where people really get so up their own notions of unrequited love that it legitimately distorts their ability to perceive the world around them. The cases where their presumption of unrequited feelings turns into a kind of body dysmorphic whatever-the-Hell. That _happens_, right—”

“Outside of your favorite tawdry novels? Rather, outside of the ones with more aspirations toward literary quality—”

“Okay, so, maybe that idea’s about as realistic as all of the, ‘Historical dissonance means that consumption _could_ have meant Hanahaki, so why not, let’s have Mimi coughing up flower petals’ productions of _La bohème_—”

“It has more in common with the common belief that people can truly lose their appetites during a particularly atrocious Hanahaki flare-up.” Although he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, Lotor slumps in his seat. He drums his fingers along the table in the way that he always breaks out when he needs to think about something more than he likes. “Your idea _might_ have some potential, darling. When I last consulted some of the research for the sake of our screenplay? There _were_ cases of Hanahaki flare-ups where people displayed patterns of self-perception that resembled body dysmorphic disorder—”

“There, see? It’s like I was saying—maybe what’s going on is, like—”

“_However_…” Lotor’s eyes flash with a tacit warning for Shiro to keep his beautiful mouth shut. “Many of those cases were anecdotal, at best. Aside from that, one literature review pointed out the fact that most of them did not consider how someone could have experienced BDD _before_ they started blossoming. The conditions might have exacerbated each other, or the Hanahaki could have made pre-extant dysmorphic feelings worse, or any number of possible explanations. Other than the, ‘Hanahaki disease _directly caused_ some patient’s feelings that at least closely resemble BDD’ version of the collective story that they tried to push…”

Lotor huffs and folds his arms over his chest as though he needs to protect himself from a conversation in which he, by his own admission, doesn’t know as much as he would like. Knowing more than Shiro counts for _something_, but Lotor’s intellectual perfectionism might not allow him to see things that way. When things get serious, he’s too fixated on making sure that he has the best and most complete answers. He can think on his feet better than most people Shiro’s ever met in his life, especially when he lets himself see preemptive action as a way of gathering new data, but Lotor nevertheless _prefers_ to have more solid ideas before committing to anything.

While Lotor ponders things—tries to gather his thoughts or whatever he thinks he’s doing—Shiro picks at his salad and tries to get as much of it down as he can. As much as he can without breaking his rule about eating slowly, anyway. He can’t see Hunk lurking anywhere, but he _knows_ that Hunk is on a shift and he _knows_ that he can’t let Hunk get any untoward ideas about how Shiro’s doing.

With how touchy Hunk’s been about Shiro’s diet since he got back, he can’t help imagining that Hunk would read too much into any moment in which Shiro seemed to be skipping meals? Considering the way that Shiro used to “diet” by doing that, acting like he could simply stop eating and do anything but make himself sick, then make himself break down and binge, and finally make himself even fatter? Shiro can’t blame Hunk for his concern, much less hold that against him. He simply needs to make sure that Hunk can see him eating.

He hasn’t gotten down as much of his lunch as he’d like by the time that Lotor clears his throat. Still, Shiro perks up and waits on the edge of the booth for what Lotor might have to say.

“What I meant to propose, darling? Was that flare-ups of Hanahaki disease can sometimes cause people to have a sense of disconnection from their own bodies. Nothing that I have read is _exactly_ like what you have described for me, but…” Lotor hugs himself tighter and gives Shiro a soft sigh. “It could simply be that everyone experiences anything like this differently?”

“Okay, but…” The objection smacks into Shiro so hard, he feels like he could get literally concussed from it. “I’m not… I haven’t had? The flare-up that started when we got home, it was my first time? How could _anything _I feel be related to Hanahaki when I’ve never had it before?”

Lotor screws up his face like he can’t believe that Shiro’s daring to question him. “Well, I would want to consult some of the literature before _committing_ to any explanation in particular? And I would need to be certain that Zethrid’s graduate student access to academic databases could let me find the most helpful studies, but…” He shrugs and almost manages to make Shiro believe he’s being casual. “One of the things that I _do_ know?”

He bats at Shiro’s ankle again, like a kitten toying with a piece of string and adorable in ways that Lotor refuses to admit. But it would be more comforting if he’d _smile_ while saying, “There is plenty of research out there—and I mean good, _reliable_ research that meets my most exacting standards—describing Hanahaki flare-ups that were… You remember the articles that I found on flare-ups that laid _dormant_?”

Shiro’s shoulders droop as he takes in Lotor’s face, searching for anything that could reassure him about this situation. Any hint that this maybe, his friend is stretching the truth or getting too caught up in the hypothetical drama of his own ideas, losing sight of reality because drama, for Lotor, is much more fun. Any sign that Lotor might be joking, pulling some kind of fast one on Shiro because he’s annoyed that Shiro still believes his love for Keith is unrequited or whatever Lotor ever thinks he’s doing—and Shiro chokes back on a weary sigh when he finds absolutely nothing.

“Except I’ve seen doctors and everything? And not just about my weight problem, but…” Shiro tugs on his white fringe as he moves it back behind his ear. “I had chest X-rays when I was down with pneumonia. If I’d had Hanahaki this entire time, wouldn’t it have shown up on those?”

It takes Lotor a moment of racking his brain, but he concedes that he has no idea. “I will consult the literature as soon as possible,” he says, and holds out his hand. “In the meantime, might I see your phone?”

Although Shiro hands it over, he still needs to ask, “What are you doing with it? And should I be worried?”

“No need for concern.” Lotor rolls his eyes when Shiro kicks at his ankle. “I am putting your gym selfie from this morning up on Instagram—”

“Oh my _God _—can you seriously not—why are you even—”

“Because hoarding your selfies like a dragon defeats the entire purpose of you taking them.” Lotor doesn’t look up as he points this out—likely because he doesn’t need to, because he knows that he’s telling Shiro exactly what Ulaz has said a thousand times before. “If you are going to join Keith in his amateur pornography, the way that I strongly suspect you will? Then you need more reassurance that other people find you beautiful. Without this reality check, your self-doubt might consume you. It might not address your _real_ problems, but it could make you feel slightly more comfortable? At any rate, you might feel less _un_comfortable…”

Proffering the phone back at Shiro, Lotor huffs. “By your own admission, you refuse to hear out the people who truly love you. Why not get validation about your appearance from strangers on the Internet.”

Shiro could find an argument for that, if he could give himself more time. But out of the corner of his eye, he catches sight of Hunk. Not doing anything in particular, but lurking behind the counter and definitely watching Shiro and Lotor’s table. With a sigh, Shiro pockets his phone. If he comes up with an objection, he’ll voice it later, whenever he doesn’t have Hunk spying on him for any signs of self-destructive stupidity on Shiro’s part.

* * *

There should be several problems with accepting Keith’s offer. There’s the matter of negotiating each other’s kinks and interests, spelling out the things that they know they don’t like doing and the ones that they’re varying degrees of open to experimenting with. There are clips to dream up, complete with the narratives that Keith likes baking into them because he gets some kind of rush out of playing Akira Crimson. There are discussions to be had about Keith’s creative process as an actor, and what Shiro might like doing on that count, and how he doesn’t actually _know_ what he’d prefer or not because, back in undergrad, Shiro only took the acting classes that Kaltenecker’s program in film and theatre production required for him to graduate, and trying to find potential solutions that account for Shiro’s ignorance…

Despite knowing that work goes into building up an alter ego like this, Shiro doesn’t expect the problem that makes the biggest nuisance of itself. He doesn’t expect to find himself sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by his friends and Ryou, passing around a torn-out page of notebook paper with a bunch of scribbled names on it, waiting for _somebody_ to say literally anything about the hypothetical aliases that he’s come up with for his _nom de porn_.

Trying not to watch too intently as Keith goes to town on an oversized slice of pizza, covered up in onions, peppers, extra cheese, and four different kinds of meat? Shiro’s getting used to that. But it’d be a lot nicer—he could enjoy the sound of Keith moaning so much more—if Keith and Lance weren’t huddling up with each other, with Lance holding up the page as they share a turn on reading it. Maybe, if they’d quit dragging this out and give Shiro some kind of sign—

Lance’s free hand shoots up as if he’s getting permission to talk in class. Excitement jolts through Shiro’s heart—and it quickly dissipates when Lance asks, “What the fuck kind of name is _Delwyn_? Because that’s even more hashtag _‘**#Not** My Shiro’_ than you running ten-kay every morning and giving up on mac and cheese.”

“It’s just a name?” Shiro tries not to let his shoulders tense up too much over the headache that Lance apparently wants to give him. But this takes enough effort that Shiro allows himself to huff. “And I haven’t _given up_ mac and cheese. I just don’t _binge eat_ ten servings of it in the middle of the night anymore.”

“If I see you eat it for lunch literally ever again, Shirito? I promise I’ll believe you, then. Until that probably doesn’t happen?” Lance pulls a face like somebody tried to make him use a face-mask that falls short of his exacting standards. “_‘Delwyn’_ sounds like somebody's freaking _Skyrim_ character.”

“It is a _Welsh_ name, Sir Lancelot.” Sighing as if he can’t believe the idiots with which he surrounds himself, Lotor slouches against the counter beside Allura. Both of them and Ryou have copies of the list in their texts, and for the moment, only Lotor looks up from his phone’s screen. “I was the one who suggested it, not Shiro. Its English translation—at least as far as I know—is, ‘pretty and white.’ Considering that Shiro’s chosen nickname _also_ means ‘white,’ I thought that—”

“Okay, it’s a stupid suggestion for a stupid name. Got it.” Lance whines when Keith thwaps him on the back of the head. “Oh, come on, Mullet! You were thinking the same thing!”

“Yeah, but you could’ve said it more _tactfully_—”

“I’m with Keith on that one, dude,” says Hunk. Behind the counter, mixing up a bowl of brownie batter, he doesn’t have the relaxed expression that cooking usually lets him have. Instead, he purses his lips so tightly that it has got to hurt. “Like, I don’t think _Delwyn_ is a great porn name, either? But if _Keith_ is telling you to be more tactful—”

“Kashi, most of these names are so…” Ryou sighs as he gives Shiro the most plaintive, long-suffering look that he’s ever seen on his brother’s face. “Look, I know that you enjoy drama, and symbolism, and making everything significantly significant? But why would you _ever_ name your porn alter ego after Great-Uncle Kiyoshi?”

Shiro’s cheeks heat up and he slouches in his seat. “I wasn’t actually… I didn’t even think about—”

“Oh, is _that_ where you got that name?” Keith perks up, but he furrows his brow like he thinks that maybe, Shiro’s started going crazy. “I _wondered_ why it sounded so familiar, but… Honestly? Ryou’s got the right idea. Naming yourself after a family member is—”

“I _didn’t _pick it because of our uncle, I just…” Groaning, Shiro pinches the bridge of his nose. “It means _‘pure’_ in English, okay? I thought it was funny, like? Because I’m using the name to do porn and everything? Hypothetically…”

He glances over to Lotor and Allura, hoping that one of them might have a _nicer_ expression, something more soothing for his nerves. But Lotor’s wearing one of his exasperated faces—it’s patented Exasperated Look Number Twenty-Seven, and it almost invariably accompanies the moments when Lotor wishes that he could make Shiro stop chasing his own metaphorical tail about any given thing—and Allura merely frowns as if she can’t comprehend what’s going on. Like she knows what everything is _supposed_ to mean, but there’s still some part of the situation that doesn’t entirely gel for her.

“It’s like what I was thinking with _Makoto_,” Shiro tells them as if this might help explain things better. “That one means _‘sincerity’ _in English. Which is _funny_, because there’s nothing sincere, not really, about playing a character—”

“You would not say such things,” Lotor points out, “if you had actually paid attention in our acting classes—”

“I _did_ pay attention! I just didn’t really understand them—”

“Anyway, I gotta vote against Makoto, man,” Hunk chimes in. He sets one of his baking pans on the counter a bit more forcefully than necessary. “It’s a good name and all? And I get the joke? But that’s Sailor Jupiter’s personal name—”

“Yeah, I know, that’s where I even got it—”

“Dude, leave Sailor Jupiter out of your and Keith’s weirdo porn thing, okay? She doesn’t deserve that.”

Sighing so heavily that he feels like he could be sick—or worse, like he could make himself start coughing—Shiro lets his head loll back. As he blinks up at the ceiling, he only finds a bit of consolation in the fact that he hasn’t hacked up any azaleas in the past eight days. Maybe nine? But he thinks it’s more like eight… He’s pretty sure that the last one came up right before he last went in for a session with Ulaz, right before he told Ulaz about Keith asking for a co-star. Which has got to be a good sign, and thank God for that. Shiro _needs_ more good signs in his life right now.

He something to help him get through Lance demanding, “Okay, what the Hell does _Kurai_ mean when it’s at home?”

“_Dark_,” Shiro tells him flatly. “And Hikage means _‘shadow.’ _I got both of them from the fact that Keith’s alias means—”

“Man, we all know that Keith’s _nom de porn_ means he’s a freaking weirdo who likes Kurosawa movies way too much. And that one freaky anime movie from the 90’s with the genetical engineering whatsits—”

“For one thing,” Keith snaps. “Otomo Katsuhiro’s _Akira_ movie came out in 1988—”

“I don’t care—”

“For another thing? That really isn’t what the movie is about. Or the manga, either—”

“I _still_ don’t care—”

“For a third thing? I’d been binge rewatching my Kurosawa collection when I picked my porn name, so—”

“What part of _‘I don’t _**_care_**_’ _is confusing for you, _Mullet_—”

“Well, I don’t know,” Lotor drawls. “How do you continually find such difficulty in understanding that Keith does not actually have a Mullet—”

“Did literally anybody even _ask_, Prince Loser—”

“I didn’t,” says Keith, dunking a cheesy bread-stick into a plastic container of marinara sauce. “But that doesn’t mean that Lotor’s _wrong_—”

“Why don’t we just call Shiro’s porn alter ego, ‘Abs McCree’ or something? He’s clearly in love with his stupid—”

“Oh my _God_, are you all _serious_,” Shiro groans, loudly enough to make everybody else shut up.

Which Shiro could handle—not least because it’s what he _wanted _—except his skin crawls as everyone zeroes in on him. As his friends and Keith and Ryou all turn their eyes to him as if he’s made out of magnets, Shiro gets a squirmy feeling along the back of his neck.

Keith’s stare, in particular, makes Shiro wish he could go burrow into a hole and hide from everybody for the next three weeks. There’s nothing special about Keith’s look—aside, of course, from the fact that _Keith_ is the one giving it to Shiro. It makes Shiro’s lungs twist around like they want to claw their way out of him. Like they’re taking spoons at Shiro’s ribs and insides, trying to make some fantastical prison break by digging enough and in the right ways. Shiro struggles, but he keeps himself breathing—and good thing, too. He doesn’t need to screw up his run of Hanahaki-free days and out his floral little problem in the process.

Especially not when everyone else is frowning at Shiro in the exact same way, making his heart wriggle with guilt.

Which Shiro deserves, because he should be ready to give them something more than random noises of dissatisfaction. He interrupted the debate, so of course everybody thinks that Shiro has something significant to say—and okay, he _does_? Maybe not as earth-shattering as they probably think, but something that could hopefully make everyone stop arguing—and if he’s gonna cut in on the discussion and make everybody else go quiet? Then it’s fair for them to expect Shiro to be ready right off the bat.

First, though, he needs to catch his breath and hug himself. He needs to clamp a hand down on his elbow and hope this clears his head, or at least makes his thoughts stop feeling like such an impenetrable swamp of things he only barely understands. He needs to remind himself that his friends aren’t _trying_ to talk over him. That they don’t want to drown out Shiro’s voice with whatever protests they think they’re raising. They don’t wish he’d shut up and never try to speak again because it isn’t as though Shiro has anything worth hearing anyway, and they’ve already decided that they are right and he is wrong and there’s nothing that Shiro can do or say to convince them that they ought to listen to him, much less seriously reconsider anything—

No. None of that is relevant, not in _this_ conversation. All of those feelings are on Shiro himself, not on any of the people who love him, and he needs to remember that before he says something that he regrets.

None of his deep breaths manage to calm his nerves—but at least Shiro gets through explaining, “I wasn’t thinking about where Keith’s porn name came from, okay? I was thinking about the fact that, depending on how you write it? _‘Akira’ _can mean _‘bright.’_ So, names that had to do with darkness and shadow? Those made sense to me—”

“You fucking _goth_,” Lance mutters, affectionately rolling his eyes.

“That being said, I just…” Shiro shrugs, turns his eyes back to the ceiling. At least the overhead lights aren’t judging him for any of his porn name suggestions. “Brother? Which names are left that nobody’s objected to, yet?”

Ryou sighs pensively, tapping at his phone. “Well, not all of them have actually been ruled out—”

“All of them have gotten objected to. Consider them ruled out—”

“Okay, so we’ve covered Delwyn, Kurai, Hikage, Makoto, and Kiyoshi…” Ryou huffs. “And I’m for sure ruling out _‘Kaworu.’_ Because I _know_ where you got that, and how about _no_. Porn names are one of the _last_ places where you should be referencing _Shinseiki Evangelion_, Kashi—”

“Hey, there’s an idea!” Lance cuts in so brightly that Shiro can _hear_ him grinning. “Why don’t you just use _Kashi_?”

“Because it’s _awkward_?” Shiro doesn’t mean to sneer when Lance thinks he’s being helpful—but he also doesn’t want to be explaining this. “Because I was named after Ojiisan, right? And the family started calling me _Kashi_ because giving me a nickname made it easier to tell which Takashi anybody meant. And the only people who really use it for me are family, or friends who might as well be family, or Keith—”

“Ugh, _fine_,” Lance groans. “Be that way about my completely helpful suggestion—”

“You pulled it out of your ass right this second, dude,” Keith snarks. The roll of his eyes is audible as he tacks on, “Don’t act like you act like you put any thought into that, is all I’m saying. If Ryou had called him something else, you would’ve tried to say _that_ was a good name for Shiro’s porny alter ego—”

“Not if he’d suggested, like… _Sailor Umbreon_ or something—”

“Why did you ever tell _anyone_ about that nickname.” Shiro huffs when Ryou only gives him an impartial shrug. Seriously, Shiro could’ve gone the rest of his life without having his face shoved in memories the self-insert, Pokémon-inspired, boy sailor senshi character that he made up while he was bored in middle school.

“Hey, if we’re putting in automatic veto votes, though?” Probably on the edge of his seat, Lance taps out the rhythm of the _Super Mario Bros._ theme music on the table. “Not that I’m trying to do that, because I get that Ryou has special brother privileges and everything? But…” He stops talking until Shiro looks him in the eye. “_‘Béla,’ _dude? Are you fucking _serious_ with me right now?”

Shiro quirks his shoulders. He can’t summon enough energy to properly shrug. “I think it’s a sexy name—”

“I kinda figured, yeah. And that’s why I’m asking: are you honest to God, legitimately fucking _serious_—”

“What’s wrong with _‘Béla’_?” Maybe Shiro shouldn’t roll his eyes—maybe that’s a bit too much biting the hand that feeds him, at the moment—but this is getting _ridiculous_. “It’s distinctive and memorable. But it’s not _so _weird that people would look at it like, ‘What the Hell kind of name is that?’ And it doesn’t sound _too _fake. It wouldn’t be _that_ awkward to use in the context of a scene, and anyway? It’s pretty, but kinda mysterious, and it has an air about it like—”

“His first crush was on Béla Lugosi, _okay_?” When Shiro balks in offense, Ryou simply shrugs as though he has no idea what Shiro’s getting at. Which, of course, he _does_ know—and the skeptical way he arches his eyebrow make that perfectly clear. “Like, okay, the crush that he has on George Michael started early enough, too. And both of them preceded him wanting to get in bed with Hugh Jackman, but…”

Pushing his glasses up his nose, Ryou explains, “Ojiisan had an extensive collection of Lugosi’s movies on VHS. We found them one time when he and Obaasan went out and our babysitter wasn’t paying attention. Naturally, we put in Tod Browning’s _Dracula_ first because—well, obviously, it’s a classic, and the one that we recognized most easily because who _doesn’t_ know about Dracula? Besides, by age six or seven? Kashi was already rather enamored with vampires—”

“And then Béla Lugosi was on the TV screen, being Dracula,” Shiro groans and launches into an explanation that he doesn’t want to give to anybody. But if they’re doing this and he can’t escape it, then at least he can control what everybody hears. “And he was so _dignified_, and _creepy_, and he was doing the thing with his hands and his eyes were, like…” He sighs warmly, like he could swoon if he were standing up. “And watching Lugosi work, I was just like, ‘Okay, yeah, I would totally let you take whatever you wanted from my neck.’”

Letting his head loll back again, Shiro kicks at one of the table’s legs. Not hard enough to knock anything over, thankfully—but that means he doesn’t let out enough of his frustration. He could kick himself for how close he gets to snarling as he tacks on, “So, is that history lesson good enough for all of you? Are we _done_ humiliating me about my childhood crushes now, or what? Does everyone want to take a go at me for Adam, too? Falling for my first boyfriend almost as soon as I met him, that’s probably got—”

“Kashi-_niichan_,” Ryou interjects so gently that it makes Shiro stop dead, mid-thought. “Nobody is trying to humiliate you—”

“I know, okay? I’m _sorry_, I just…” Shiro hugs himself as if that gives him a shield to hide behind, even though it doesn’t. “So which names are left? I thought I was coming up with _good_ suggestions, but since apparently, I wasn’t? Which ones can I still—”

“We’ve still got Sable and Taka, and…” Ryou sighs like he knows that he’s about to say something Shiro’s gonna hate. “Before I tell you what I think of those? Did you take the former from _Good Omens_? Because if you did, then I’m going to take issue with you naming your porn alter ego after the Apocalyptic Horseperson _Famine_—”

“If I wanted a _Good Omens_ porn name, I would’ve just gone with _Crowley_—”

“Except that would’ve made everybody think of _Aleister_ Crowley,” Hunk points out, drawling and no doubt getting in with everyone else who’s already rolled their eyes at Shiro. “Or maybe you could’ve had a few people thinking about _Supernatural_—”

“Hey!” Keith huffs. “Why are you talking about the show that must not be named—”

“I’m just saying! Shiro picking the _Good Omens_ character he most wants to sleep with wouldn’t necessarily make people think of—”

“I _know _that, okay? It’s kind of the point. People _wouldn’t_ necessarily think my porn name was a reference to something. Just like I _thought_ I was doing with a name like _‘Sable,’_ since I didn’t remember Famine—”

“I only felt compelled to ask out of unrelated concerns, alright?” Which is probably fair enough in everybody else’s minds, even if Shiro thinks it’s crazy. But he’d rather dwell on trying to prove those fears unfounded than listen to Ryou tell him, “The bigger issue I can see is… You _do _know that ‘Taka’ means _‘garbage’ _in Swahili, right?”

Shiro wrinkles his nose and shakes his head. “But if we’re asking questions, though? Why do _you_ know that it means _‘garbage’_ in Swahili?”

Ryou shrugs as if this is perfectly common knowledge among people who do not speak Swahili. “I remember it from some young readers book we had when we were kids,” he explains. “I mean, I didn’t know what _‘Taka’_ meant until way later, when I got curious and looked it up—”

“Dude, dude, wait, don’t tell me!” Lance bounces in his seat, beaming like this is the greatest day of his entire life. “It was a sweet, but silly, but also kinda stupid story about a total nerd who fell in love with his best—”

“It was tie-in merchandise for _The Lion King_, actually.” Glancing nervously at Shiro, Ryou sighs. “_‘Taka’_ was _Scar’s_ name. Y’know, before he…” He gestures at his face, tracing an invisible line over one of his eyes. “Before he got the eponymous—”

“Oh, my _God_!” Lance crows with laughter. He topples sideways into Keith, which gets him pushed onto the table.

But Shiro can’t exactly _celebrate _that. Not when Keith’s failing to hide his chuckles behind his hand. Doubly not when Lance continues laughing, and triply not when it spreads to Lotor and Allura. As Shiro buries his face in his palms, Hunk and Ryou are the only people in the apartment who have the decency not to laugh at him for this. Not that it counts for much when—

“Hey! Hey, Shiro,” Hunk calls out, deceptively gentle. “Did you _ever_ think hyenas essential—”

“Stop it,” Shiro grumbles.

“Oh no, man!” Lance props himself up on his elbows. Through his snickers, he bites out, “They’re so _crude_! And unspeakably plain!”

“Guys, _please_—”

“But maybe they’ve a _glimmer_ of potential,” Allura chirps, grinning and clapping delightedly.

And Keith just needs to join in with, “If _allied_ to his vision and brain!”

As the four of them launch into a joyful rendition of “Be Prepared”—with Lance taking the vocal lead because of course he does—it’s all that Shiro can do to stay in his seat instead of hiding under the table. Or running to his room, hiding there, and turning up his Emilie Autumn so loudly that the neighbors call their super with a noise complaint. He tries to hide his face in his hands. Tries to at least keep them from watching, right up close and personal, as his cheeks go so red, he feels like he could faint or catch fire or, knowing his luck, possibly both at the same time.

He gets a rush of gratitude when Lotor clears his throat over top of the final chorus. But as he parts his fingers, Shiro sees Lotor smirking. That could mean so many things—but Lotor has a glint like broken glass behind his eyes, and Shiro barely manages to keep himself from shivering.

“Not that I do not see the humor in this situation, darlings. But I _do _think that you ought to give poor Takashi some breathing room, stop rubbing his face in this _honest mistake_ he’s stumbled into this time…” Lotor’s speaking too mildly for Shiro to trust a word of it—and he betrays his façade with a serpentine snicker. “Besides, none of you are _preening_ enough to see this joke through properly—”

“Oh. My. Cheese-licking. Burger-flipping. _God_—”

“When it comes to dedication, you’ve got the _lion’s_ share,” Lotor drawls, almost perfectly recreating Scar’s voice and accent from the movie. “But when it comes to sheer performance _quality_? I’m afraid you’re somewhat lacking—”

“Okay, I get the point!” Smacking the table, Shiro pushes himself up. Turning toward the bathroom, he snaps, “I guess I’m making porn as _Sable_ now. You made up my mind for me! Is everybody freaking _happy_?”

As he stalks off, Shiro notices Keith and Ryou shifting in their seats. Making faces like maybe they’re sorry for how this conversation’s gone, and maybe they want to grab his wrist and keep Shiro here so they can apologize for some part of this whole garbage situation. Shiro darts away and doesn’t give them the opportunity. He locks the door behind him so nobody can chase him in here, intent on telling him that nobody meant for anything they said to hurt him. Maybe he’ll be able to hear their justifications for this later. Maybe some of them will actually apologize, and he’ll feel terrible for making them do that when, as ever, the problem is likely down to him taking things too personally and bristling in situations that do not call for that.

Right now, though? Shiro needs a cool-down shower before his brain overheats and comes melting out his ears.

* * *

As the shower roars to life and Shiro starts singing as if no one can hear him, everyone in the kitchen’s vicinity stays awkwardly silent.

There’s the sound of Hunk mixing his brownie batter by hand, even though it was perfectly blended when he first got out the pan. A chair scrapes along the floor as Allura takes a seat between her boyfriends. Sighing, she leans on Ryou’s shoulder, but even when he hugs her, neither of them has anything to say. Slumped on the table with his head pillowed on his forearms, Lance opens his mouth as if _he_ could find the magic words that might revive the entire conversation—but it takes him a few rounds before he manages to do more than grumble without any discernible syllables.

At that, all he ultimately comes up with is, “Mullet, how in the _fuck _can your idiot make that _Sleeping Beauty_ song sound _angsty_.”

“Hell if I know,” Keith deadpans. “You’re the one who insists on calling him a _goth_.”

“Yeah, I do. Because he pretty much only wears black, he listens to Joy Division, The Cure, and Bauhaus unironically, he loves Emilie Autumn more than anyone else I’ve ever met, he knew The Sisters of Mercy _before_ they had a song in a Three Flavours Cornetto movie, _and_ if you were a vampire, he definitely would’ve fucked you like twenty-seven years ago already.” Lance huffs as though he has won a decisive victory. “If it looks, walks, talks, and smells like a _goth_—”

“Shiro and Ryou were_ infants_ twenty-seven years ago.” Rolling his eyes so hard, it’s a miracle that they stay inside his skull, Keith kneads at his temples. He looks a bit like he might be sick, but thankfully, he keeps himself restrained. “And I wasn’t even _born_ yet back then, so I don’t—”

“You could’ve been born if you were a _vampire_—”

“Vampires are fucking _fictional_, Lance—”

“You don’t know that for sure, though!”

“Yes, I do! They’re mythical folklore creatures that got co-opted by the British Romantics, and then by Bram Stoker, then F.W. Murnau and Hollywood, and then Hammer Horror got in on everything, and we aren’t even close to the Anne Rice shit yet ‘cause—”

“Oh, _wow_, you can pay attention to Shiro’s history lessons on How To Goth Well for goth-trash fucking _goths_—”

“Yeah! I listen to him when he talks! What a concept! It’s not _his_ fault that he gets totally adorable when he starts babbling about vampires—”

“Which could totally hypothetically possibly be _real_ somewhere in the world—”

Groaning over Lance, Keith folds his leg up, rests his heel on his seat as if he wants to kick the guy who is, in Lotor’s humble opinion that no one asked for, The Gang’s hands-down single most annoying person. Perhaps it’s uncalled for immature, but some part of Lotor wouldn’t mind seeing that happen. Keith used to play soccer and he knows how to handle himself in a scrap. He could kick Lance in a way that wouldn’t hurt him too terribly, but would also be sufficiently entertaining.

“I’m _just saying_,” Lance grouses, grabbing at his bag until Ryou slides it across the table at him. He pulls out a compact mirror and a container of his favorite facial lotion—which ought to calm him down, if anyone cares what Lotor thinks. Yet, Lance remains as wired as ever, as he goes on, “We have a disease that makes people cough up unrequited love flowers. And don’t try acting like they’re not symbolic, either. Because for one thing, you’re fucking wrong. And for another? Everybody in this fucking room but _Ryou_ has coughed up black rose petals for your _boyfriend_, like that’s not the most obvious piece of evidence that Shiro is a _goth_!”

Hunk sighs wearily. “That’s totally not the point,” he deadpans, voice low enough that only Lotor hears him. “It isn’t even the point’s weird, backwoods second-cousin from Middle of Nowhere, West Virginia. But okay, sure, let’s get hung up on whether or not Shiro is a—”

At least Keith has enough sense about him to ask, “What, exactly, does that have to do with vampires?”

“We have Hanahaki disease. What makes _vampires_ so implausible?”

“Not a bad point,” Hunk whispers, nudging at Lotor’s bicep. “If he could only keep his calm while delivering it—”

“The difference,” Keith says, “is that Hanahaki disease is real, and _vampires_ aren’t—”

“How do you know that, though—”

“_Everybody_ knows it, Lance! If there were seriously a bunch of unnaturally beautiful, glamorous, undead monsters roaming around the world, drinking human blood—”

“Who says that they’d be _those_ kinds of vampires? I didn’t say that—”

“He also failed _not_ to say it.” Lotor turns toward Hunk with a smirk. “Likely because we all _know_ that he would prefer Robert Pattinson—”

“And you know what all this sounds like to _me_?” If Lotor were in the betting mood, he’d wager that no one but Lance knows what anything sounds like to him. Considering precedent, Lance might not even know that yet, himself. But as he checks his chin in his mirror, Lance says, “It sounds a _lot_ like the bullshit _you’ve_ been on since, what? Not _even_ twenty-four hours after groping Shiro’s abs all over the baggage claim?”

There comes the silence again, dropping into the room and making Lotor cringe preemptively.

Colder than the dead air, though, is the glare that Keith shoots at Lance. Balling his hand up in his sweatpants, he locks his eyes on Lance. Refuses to look away. “What did you—”

“I think,” Allura jumps in, holding up both hands as if this can calm things down before they start. “I think that, perhaps? We all might need to breathe a bit? None of us handled that debate about Shiro’s pornographic alias very well—”

“Not saying that we did and not for nothing, Princess,” Keith says, voice low and eyes still glued to Lance’s skinny, increasingly wide-eyed face. “But I wanna know what the Hell your boyfriend was talking about.”

“Oh, _please_.” Lance snaps his compact mirror shut. He needs to open it up again immediately thereafter, because he wasn’t done scanning his skin for blemishes—but as he picks that up, he tells Keith, “Since the day after he got back, you’ve been all kinds of, ‘Blah blah, it wasn’t just about getting hot for Shiro. Blah blah, losing weight was more than an appearance or a vanity thing for him. Blah blah blah, my name’s Keith, and I think I know _everything_ about Shiro’s motivations, and I’m saying he didn’t just care about his stupid, sexy abs’—”

“Because he _didn’t_ just care about that, you idiot! Have you _listened_ to him talk about—”

“Damn right, I’ve listened! And I get what you and him are saying, but…” Dipping his finger into the container of skin cream, Lance sighs. “I think that being hot by stupid, conventional standards _was_ a big deal for Shiro. I think it still _is_ a big deal for Shiro. And I don’t think you can just _discount_ something that’s this big a freaking deal because you’ve wanted to fuck him into next Tuesday since before I even _met_ you!”

Allura winces slightly, hearing that. Hunk makes a low, discontented sound as if he might be sick. Lotor, for his own part, lets his shoulders hunch like Cova’s do when he doesn’t feel comfortable with any given situation—and as he glances at the table, he finds himself on the receiving end of unnervingly sympathetic looks from both Keith and Ryou.

Of course, some awkwardness is to be expected. Allura and Hunk have both dated Keith. Lotor dated Shiro. Whether or not Lance _intends_ to shove their faces in anything—whether or not he _intends_ to point out that Keith and Shiro have ever been in love with each other, even when they wanted to be with other people—that’s rather how his accusation comes across. Honestly, all they need now is for the Adam fellow who Shiro dated in high school, Keith’s two high school flings, and Sendak to show up at the apartment, and this will become the most awkward of all possible awkward moments that Lotor has ever endured in his entire life. Not least because he would have dated Sendak himself, or at least had sex with him, had Shiro’s ex not been adamantly disinterested in Lotor.

…Well, no. Perhaps this wouldn’t to top the time when Sincline showed up at Lotor and Acxa’s old apartment, got their super to let him in, and announced that he was staying until Mother agreed on trying another round of rehab at Promises or the Aton Center. As if that had not been enough on its own, Sincline couldn’t find his brother immediately, waltzed into Lotor’s bedroom without so much as a courtesy knock, and subsequently walked in on Lotor and Shiro _in flagrante delicto_. Also, Lotor had not yet explained the existence of his deplorable twin to his then-boyfriend. All things considered, it might take a great deal for Lotor to find a situation more painfully awkward than that.

Even so, this moment would comfortably rest in the top five, if Sendak were to show up out of nowhere.

Fortunately, _Keith_ must be having a superhuman day for willpower and resolve, because he keeps his composure better than Lotor would do, in his shoes. He doesn’t flinch a bit or show any signs of a building outburst as he tells Lance, “I never said that Shiro _didn’t care_ about being conventionally hot. What I _have_ said is that he cared about other things more. And now, I’m also saying that you, of all people, have no right to judge him for caring about his appearance while you’re getting your finicky weirdo skin gunk all over my fucking table.”

Balking, Lance snaps his compact again. “That is _not_ the same thing as what Shiro did, and you _know it_!”

“Okay, I’ll grant that they’re working on different magnitudes, but come _on_—”

“But nothing! At least I show off my gorgeous skin! Shiro did _how much _work on his body, and he still wears the same old jeans and t-shirts—”

“_Lance_,” Ryou groans into Allura’s hair. “Baby, I think you are missing Keith’s point by a significant margin—”

“Am not, I just haven’t gotten to it yet!” Grimacing like a child in time-out, Lance insists, “Maybe I like it when people look at me, sure. But I take care of my skin because it makes me _feel good_. Y’know, like taking care of yourself usually _does—_”

“That’s exactly what Shiro told me about losing weight, so—”

“Except he _obviously _cares way more about other people think—”

Keith laughs bitterly. “Says the man who considers deleting selfies off of Instagram because he didn’t get enough likes or comments—”

“That’s _different_!”

“How and why, Lance. Show your work.”

It’s an interesting enough conversation, but Lotor is somewhat more concerned with what’s going on behind him. Hunk is saying absolutely nothing, not even his well-mannered snark at his friends’ expense. The few noises that Lotor _can_ make out are small, damp sounds with no ostensible explanation. Sitting on the counter, the brownie batter is sorely neglected—very strange, given that Hunk gets emotional comfort out of baking; not so much the food, but the whole process of assembling and cooking it—and Lotor spots Hunk over by the sink. Alone.

Without a word, Lotor slinks into the kitchen. He isn’t trying to sneak, so his heart twists in guilt when putting a hand on Hunk’s back makes him startle. When Hunk gasps and makes a noise like a dog who hopes to avoid being shouted at, Lotor starts trying to find something he can say, something that might provide Hunk with some sort of comfort. He doesn’t come up with any words, but he’s _going _to do it. He can charm his way into and out of anything.

But the would-be consolation dies in his mouth as he glances at the sink. Amidst the dishes waiting to be done sits a pile of small, brilliantly purple petals. Right on top, a fully formed, five-petaled blossom. Lotor’s breath hitches in his throat as he recognizes what it is: a rhododendron.

“I…” He starts, going wide-eyed at Hunk. “My dear…?”

Hunk blushes and hunches his shoulders, but he doesn’t pull away. “Sorry, I… Thought I’d clean them up? So you maybe wouldn’t notice—”

Something clatters behind them, but Lotor doesn’t turn to see what it is. Dimly, he hopes that somebody has thrown something at Lance in the hopes of making him shut up about things he only halfway understands. Much less dimly and with far more clarity, Lotor can feel his heart beating in his throat as he tunes out the others’ voices and focuses on Hunk.

“Have I done something wrong by you—”

“No, no, no, it’s nothing like… You haven’t been, like—”

“Have I not been forward enough? That is to say, about my intentions?” Lotor swallows thickly. “I did not _think_ that I was being particularly subtle about being interested in you, my dear? But then again, I have been quite wrong about such things before.”

Granted, Lotor’s worst example of this was with Shiro, the man who could find a romantic hint sitting on his desk, in an impeccably wrapped box, with no fewer than five tags and labels that had his name in the _“To:” _position… and then deliver said hint to Keith instead, assuming that someone must have left it in the wrong room by accident. But Shiro’s perpetual inability to pick up on the interest that comes his way from other people does not necessarily mean that Lotor is always romantically adept, himself.

However, Hunk shakes his head, and meets Lotor’s eyes with a strangely resolved expression.

“It’s not that I’m missing any cues from you,” he says, softly but not quite gently. “It’s more that… I _know_ you’re interested, but…” A shrug, and Hunk makes a pensive noise. It gives Lotor the distinct impression of someone tiptoeing through a room of irreplaceable, impossibly fragile family heirlooms. “I don’t feel like I know what _kind_ of interest you’ve got for me?”

“I’m quite taken with you, my dear. I thought that this was…”

Watching Hunk brush a hand up and down the curve of his belly, Lotor trails off. Watching him pat himself on the fullest part of his middle, Lotor feels his mouth go dry. His throat feels thick and sticky, as if he has a literal frog and a bag full of rocks lodged behind his Adam’s apple. All of the things that Hunk _isn’t_ saying click perfectly into place, and as Lotor taps his free hand’s fingers along the edge of the sink, he can’t quite shake the feeling that he is listening to the snare drum lines that precede a hanging… Part of his brain screams at him to deny everything, brush this all off, make a clever, off-the-cuff joke that highlights his charm and his admitted intellectual brilliance, but ultimately dismisses Hunk’s concerns as utter nonsense.

Instead of listening to that impulse, though, Lotor gives Hunk a nod.

“You realize that I find you incredibly attractive,” he explains, spelling everything out simply to be certain that they are on the same page about this. “However, you also know that I have certain, mmm, _preferences_ in men, and…” Lotor could sigh so easily right now, but he forces himself not to as he says, “You are not yet certain that I see you as anything _but_ a sex object and a friend.”

Hunk gives Lotor a one-handed finger-gun salute. “No offense meant, but… Bingo?”

Again, Lotor bites back on a sigh. “That makes sense,” he acquiesces. “I may not _like_ it very much, but… I do understand the apprehension.”

“Okay, but I mean it? That I didn’t mean any offense by that or—”

“No offense taken, my dear.” Gently squeezing Hunk’s shoulder, Lotor smiles. “I shall simply need to prove myself to you, Hawea Garrett. Perhaps next Thursday night? With any specific plans up for discussion, pending your acceptance or lack thereof?”

First step: Lotor must learn how to watch Hunk blush without going quite pink in the cheeks, himself.

Once he has that handled, however long it takes to do so, Lotor will need an endless loop of Queen’s “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy” and a suitably dapper first date outfit. Also, a good idea for a first date, and a fact-check from Acxa.

As Hunk puts his brownies in the oven, Lotor fires off a text to her: _[Does it count as a first date if you already know someone quite well?]_

Acxa’s response arrives promptly: _[As long as you suck it up and ask Hunk out already, you can call it whatever you want.]_

Rolling his eyes, he taps back: _[I already have, and he said yes. We don’t know what we’re doing yet, only that it will be on Thursday. Also, I shall need to be quite charming, and genteel, and find something to prove the veracity of my romantic intentions with him.]_

This time, Acxa’s reply takes a few moments to come in: _[Make Shiro tell him how many times you’ve stopped an editing session to whine about Hunk’s perfect smile. Or better yet? Stop asking me for advice when you know that I don’t know Hunk as well as you do. You’re a genius. Quit the performative backflips and figure out a game-plan for yourself.]_

Lotor hums, pocketing his phone. This may require ingenuity on his part—or, infinitely more complicated, emotional vulnerability.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Sheith get explicit, even though no one actually gets penetrated. Stuffing/feeding, feedist dirty talk, some feedist-themed humiliation (both Shiro/“Sable” going after Keith/“Akira” for his weight gain and Keith going after Shiro for being a skinny bitch), belly rubs, grinding, rough body play, and as per this fic’s usual, Shiro being a dumb-fuck who makes questionable life choices.

“You remember what the plan is, right?”

With a heavy sigh, Shiro looks at Keith’s reflection in the bathroom mirror. “It’s really not that complicated, Baby.”

In the face of Shiro trying to smile at him, Keith folds his arms over his chest and glares daggers at him. “This is your first time deliberately participating in a clip,” he says flatly. “And it’s not like I’m usually in the business of having a co-star. _And_ you didn’t exactly _plan_ on getting in on this life—”

“Do I need to prove to you that I don’t regret rubbing your belly? I wasn’t gonna let you suffer—”

“No. You need to prove to me that you remember the _plan_, and the _rules_, and everything about how we’re doing this.” He hugs himself tighter, but softens considerably as he says, “Shiro, please. You wouldn’t do BDSM without making sure you knew everybody’s safe-words. And now, I need you to go over what we’re doing so I _know for sure_ that we’re on the same page.”

Shiro’s fingers still in his hair and his teeth grind against each other. Because this is important, he turns to face Keith, slouches back and braces himself on the edge of the sink. He tries not to get distracted by the sight of Keith—no easy task when he’s standing there in a skin-tight, bright red t-shirt with the cover art from _American Beauty/American Psycho_ stretched out across his belly and black, elastic-waisted short-shorts that leave nothing to the imagination about his hips, his thighs, or his junk. Shiro drums his fingertips on the cold porcelain to keep himself grounded in the moment. Keep himself anchored in _something real_ so that he can’t get totally lost in his own thoughts. When Keith pointedly clears his throat, Shiro gives him a nod and hopes that the sentiment of _“I’m working on it, Baby” _comes across.

Finally, he looks up and tells Keith, “We’re really gonna keep this simple because it’s my first time. Stuffing clip, to start—”

“What does that actually _mean_, though, Shiro,” Keith bites out.

God, but it takes an inhuman amount of effort for Shiro to not snap back with, _“Right. Of course. I have no idea what a stuffing clip is. Not like I’ve been editing your videos since you first got started in this amateur porn gig. Not like I’ve been watching clips like yours and reading feeder porn in secret since both of us were still jail-bait.”_

A deep breath helps him steady his nerves so he won’t say anything like that. Gripping onto the sink—clutching it so tightly, he could swear that he feels his knuckles trying to slice clean through his skin—Shiro gives Keith the nod that he no doubt wants. Because he has a point, and as the guilty twisting in Shiro’s stomach reminds him: nobody else but Lotor and Ryou knows what kind of kinky things he’s into in the dead of night or whenever the apartment’s empty. Maybe Keith has a knowing glimmer in his eyes, but there is no way that he knows what gets Shiro. He doesn’t even know how Shiro really feels about him—

“Answer me or I’m calling this off right now, Kashi.”

Shiro groans, both from the steely, arctic chill of Keith’s ultimatum and from getting snapped at with a nickname that so few people even get to know exists. He wilts under the weight of Keith’s glare for him, and somehow, he manages to say, “A stuffing clip means that you’re going to set yourself up on your bed with a bunch of food. And you’re gonna go to town on eating it. You’re going to stuff yourself—hence the name of the sub-genre or whatever you wanna call it—and part of the appeal comes from thinking that it’s too much or that you can’t keep eating? Or, for some people, that comes from how we play it when you go there? So, if you say it’s too much or you’re too full, that isn’t necessarily a sign to stop.”

“Good boy,” Keith almost-purrs, forcing Shiro to bite back on a shudder so that he won’t make this more awkward than it already is. But God help him, hearing Keith say those words sends something warm and wanting down to the pit of Shiro’s stomach and makes his dick twitch besides. “So, where do _you_ come into things?”

“I’m playing Sable. Who is a feeder. Which means that he wants to help Akira get even bigger and fatter—or that isn’t _always_ what it means, necessarily? Sometimes, they just enjoy the feeding without needing to have the weight gain…”

Shiro trails off as Keith arches his eyebrow by way of telling him to get to the point. He muffles a cough behind his wrist (and says a silent prayer of thanks when it doesn’t hit him very deeply _or_ end in a round of red azalea petals coming up). He digs against the edge of the sink and takes several slow, deep breaths. Tries to smother the guilt that’s squirming around his insides with a pillow because it’s helping nobody right now, least of all Shiro himself. No one gets anything out of his body reminding him that he might as well be tattling on a friend right now by rattling off things that he’s not supposed to know about. By merely thinking of admitting to most of the kinky things he knows.

Sure, Shiro has no idea where that feeling’s coming from—but trying to figure that out right now is even more than wildly unhelpful.

“I come in when you signal for me,” Shiro says. At Keith’s insistence, he demonstrates the hand sign that they agreed on. “You keep going until you’re ready, and then I swan in with a ton of stuff about, like? How you look, and what you’re doing, and what it makes me feel or how it might feel for you—verbally teasing you and stuff? But trying to hold back, kinda? Since we aren’t really going for a humiliation thing, exactly? At least not today—”

“And we aren’t negotiating _any_ clips with serious humiliation-play until you get through _this_ one, first—”

“Well, once I get you good and riled up?” Shiro’s brows quirk up right back at Keith. Patience may yield focus, but seriously, can Shiro get any words in edgewise? “One of the high points that I need to hit? Is about your size. And then you’re gonna tap on my leg three times. Which is when you throw your weight around with me, and I mean literally. Like, catching me off my guard and knocking me down. Using every pound against me—except it’s more like Lotor’s stage combat classes from undergrad than a real fight? Because we’re consenting to everything, and I need to be as involved as you in the physical side of things—”

“What do you do if it _really_ starts to hurt? And not in some John Mellencamp, Carly Rae Jepsen, _hurts so good_ way, either. What do you do if you start feeling pain that you _don’t _like?” Keith’s voice is low and his expression is misleadingly even. Most people would probably look at him and think he doesn’t care.

But Shiro catches the gleam of concern behind Keith’s eyes and can’t stop himself from smiling softly. “I can tap you three times. Quick succession, like the short beats in Morse code. That’s a sign to maybe slow down a little, or find something else that we can do—and you can do the same thing if you don’t like what I’m doing, at any point? Or we can break out the red-yellow-green system. Red is a hard stop. Green means we’re good to go. Yellow means, _‘Hey, can we pause, break character, and talk about this?’_”

Keith nods in confirmation, and he gives Shiro one of their small, private smiles. One of the ones so soft that Keith never lets anyone but Shiro see them. Under the combined weight of those reactions, Shiro’s chest floods with warmth. Relief. A heavy feeling that could be the prelude to Hanahaki coughing, or it could be how much he wants Keith to pin him down already. Whatever he’s feeling, his heart strains against his rib-cage like it could burst out of his chest and run screaming down the block. If he and Keith didn’t have important work that they need to get to already, Shiro could stay here all day, basking in truly feeling like he’s back at home after being gone so long, it hurts. Like he’s finally back where he belongs.

Except, Keith nudges him once more about safe-words, and Shiro has to nod. Has to get through saying, “Yours is mania, like the new Fall Out Boy album. And it’s a hard stop safe-word. As soon as you say that, everything’s over. We stop immediately, I turn off the cameras. We clean up, do whatever aftercare you need, and then figure out what went wrong so we can do better when we try to get reshoots done.”

“What about _your_ personal safe-word?” Keith doesn’t quite pout at Shiro, but he screws up his face as though it’s taking unbelievable effort for him not to slip into an expression that he knows Shiro finds perfectly adorable. “Do you have anything to ask _me_ about that?”

“Come on, baby—I trust you completely. You know what you’re doing and you’d never hurt me in any—”

“Ask. The. Question. Shiro.” Keith’s eyes flash like the edge of a switchblade. Like he’s daring Shiro to act so flippant one more time.

Shiro’s shoulders sink far enough to make his back ache in protest, but he manages to ask, “Do you remember my safe-word and what it means?”

“_Good. Boy_,” Keith hisses. He needs a moment to breathe deeply and shake his head—probably trying to rattle himself around, clear up any loose wires that he feels like he might have in his brain right now. But he doesn’t keep Shiro waiting long before he says, “Your safe-word is Darmok, like that _Star Trek_ episode that you and Hunk love so much. As soon as you say it, I stop. Everything stops. We drop the scene, drop Akira and Sable, go right back to being Keith and Shiro. And we do whatever kind of aftercare you need. We talk about what happened later and pick a new shoot date. But not until you have a clearer head.”

Shiro nods because he has no idea what else to do. For a long moment, he lets the silence settle in between them as though it has any right to be there. As though anyone invited it in. There aren’t any conversational guides or how-to manuals for trying to segue into actually performing the acts of kink that you and your best friend have just negotiated. There should be, but there aren’t. In lieu of any other ideas, Shiro sighs.

“So, which treats d’you want to start with, Baby?”

* * *

_“Just Desserts.” They say you are what you eat, but there’s nothing sweet about Akira, this time! He’s being such a good little fatty at first, stuffing himself with sweets and ice cream so he can get even bigger—until Sable teases him about still being small. Watch Akira throw his weight around, trying to make Sable feel every pound. Includes stuffing and fat talk, teasing, some mild humiliation, and rough body play._

* * *

Apparently, the answer to Shiro’s question might as well be _“everything.”_

Well, maybe not _literally _everything, but Keith still has Shiro set up a pretty impressive spread for him. They pull out three of the folding card-tables that Hunk’s moms got them as a moving-in gift, and load them down with enough sweets that looking at all of them makes Shiro feel slightly queasy. A plate of Hunk’s double-fudge brownies. A box of his cupcakes (chocolate with raspberry filling and sugary frosting). A pack of double-stuffed Oreos and a quart of whole milk that Keith got special for this clip; he drew a star on the label in black marker so that Hunk wouldn’t misappropriate the milk for some recipe. Five packages of different Milano cookies, which astounds Shiro simply because he didn’t know that there were that many flavors—

“Okay, but? _Seriously_,” he can’t help himself from saying as Keith lines them all up. “How many variations do people really _need_ on that formula? It’s two wafers connected by a strip of chocolate. That’s what the cookie is, that’s what works—”

“The double dark chocolate ones taste really good, though,” Keith counters, shrugging and adjusting the table with the cupcakes on it, so it’s at a better angle for the right-hand camera. “Anyway, variety is the spice of life or whatever, right? And it’s easier to plow through more of them if I don’t get _bored_, so…”

As he checks the new camera, Shiro mulls that idea over. Turns it over in his mind because he _should_ give Keith’s words their due consideration. Once he’s made sure that the camera won’t come falling from Keith’s headboard—it’s fixed there very well; they’d need to rock the bed like—and checked the feed on his laptop to make sure he likes the angle, Shiro supposes that he sees Keith’s points. Gets the bowl of popcorn—a necessary palate-cleanser, or so Keith claims—off the desk and sets it on the middle card-table, and confirms that Keith’s right.

“And I’m not the one who’s eating them,” he finally says. “So I guess my opinion probably doesn’t matter much, in this situation.”

“Your opinion on cookies will matter again when Girl Scout Cookie season starts.” Keith flips his bangs back off his forehead and gives Shiro a pointed look that really wishes it were stern. “I don’t care if you limit yourself to the shortbread ones and the Thin Mints. They’re your favorites anyway, and if anybody tries to yell at you for eating what _you want_? I will smack Lance—”

“What if he isn’t the one who’s saying—”

“Oh, he _will _be. I’d bet you anything.” Huffing, Keith stretches out, tugs the hem of his shirt up even further on his middle. He reaches for the ceiling, rocks up onto the balls of his feet, and when he comes down with a sigh, he doesn’t bother tugging his top back down where it belongs. He leaves the lower curve of his belly pooching out like he’s daring anybody to call him out on exposing himself like this.

Grunting as he rolls a hitch out of his shoulder, Keith says, “Anyway, my point is? You’re right about my cookie-related opinions being the ones that matter most toady. But it’s not like yours aren’t important, period? And some of my regulars have already been talking about pooling some money together to buy a ton of Girl Scout Cookies for us so they can commission a special stuffing video _and_ give money to a good cause. Something _other_ than helping us pay the rent and build a financial safety-net, I mean.”

With a shrug, he throws Shiro a deceptively angelic smirk. “If they’re gonna pay for it anyway? Then I wanna use the opportunity to help my friends out, too. So, I’ll need to get orders from The Gang, and especially from you—”

“I think your clients will probably be able to tell that you aren’t eating all the cookies. Especially if Lance orders as many Samoas as Ryou and Allura will let him.”

“Whatever. We can sort out the specifics later—”

Shiro holds up his hands in mock-surrender. “I’m just saying, Baby? You’re my best friend and there is basically nothing that I wouldn’t do for you? But that sounds like some really questionable business ethics, to me. Worse, going through with the idea could actually be really bad for you in the long run. Like, if clients think that you don’t make good on promises, once they’ve paid you—”

“We. Can sort out. The specifics and the ethics. _Later_. Shiro.” Keith folds his arms over his chest and shoots Shiro a sharp glance, as if asking whether or not he intends to hold them up forever. “Right now? My clients have a different clip that they’re waiting to see. Which means that you and I have work to do. Remember what my safe-word is?”

“Mania, like the new Fall Out Boy album,” Shiro recites dutifully. He checks the mic-box taped to his hip, keeps himself from rolling his eyes at Keith’s pointed throat-clearing. “Do you remember _my_ safe-word, Baby?”

Keith nods, gives Shiro a small, approving smile that makes a craving slither down Shiro’s spine. Blissfully ignorant to what he’s doing—because, really, why should his smiles in this context mean anything different from what they usually do—Keith tells Shiro, “Darmok, like that freaking _Star Trek_ episode.”

With that cleared up and the cameras rolling, though, Shiro has to relocate to the sidelines—or over by the door, such as the case is. He sits in Keith’s desk chair, pressing it as close to the wall as he can, and folds his arms over his chest. Ducking his chin, Keith takes several deep breaths, no doubt trying to center himself before he attempts anything. With his stomach sucked in, he tugs his shirt back down to where it’s supposed to hit him, and when Keith looks up again, he has snapped perfectly into character.

Drumming his fingers along his elbow, Shiro makes a mental note to ask Keith how he does that, later. Because he makes it look so easy, and so many precedents from undergraduate acting classes say it isn’t gonna be. Not for Shiro, anyway.

In the meantime, though, they have work to do. Maybe Keith is simply posing, at the moment—angling himself this way and that, jostling his belly so his future-audience will see how it jiggles through this shirt, cheating toward the different cameras and treating them to different angles, different views of how his tummy pooches out or the plush curves of his hips and thighs—but that’s an important aspect of the set-up. If he doesn’t want to talk in-character until Shiro comes into the scene, then Keith needs to give his clients some metaphysical lube before throwing them in the deep end.

Dimly, Shiro makes another mental note to smack himself in the mixed metaphors, if he can’t find a way to knock it off. Again, though, that’s gonna need to happen later. As Keith nudges the tray-tables closer to the bed and settles on his mattress, Shiro rubs hard at the bridge of his nose. He swallows any noises that try to come up, bites back on the feeling like he might start coughing if he isn’t careful. Lest he lose control of his reactions, Shiro covers his own mouth with his hand—and not a moment too soon. The plastic crinkles and growls as Keith rips the Oreos open, and it’s all Shiro can do to force himself not to freaking gasp. Not while he’s hooked up to a mic.

Raising the first cookie to his lips, Keith grins. Waggles his eyebrows as if daring his audience to come on and make his day. Or maybe like he’s making them complicit in what he’s about to do. Like he’s telling them, _“You’re all just as into this as I am, if not more… Don’t worry, I won’t share your dirty little secret, as long as you give in to what you’re feeling… Give yourself over to it and come along for a truly wild ride…”_

Whatever effect it might have on his clients later? That grin makes Shiro’s insides writhe with wanting as if he has a school of eels coursing through his veins, his nerves, his muscles. When Keith snaps off his first bite—eating his Oreos like a heathen instead of licking the cream off first, like you’re _supposed to do _—Shiro’s heart flings itself against his lungs like a little kid having a temper tantrum in the middle of a Target because their parents wouldn’t buy them the overpriced toy they wanted. Keith isn’t even moaning, so there’s seriously no reason for Shiro to be so turned on by this.

Except he is. Because Keith’s going to push himself through eating as much of this spread as possible, something that Shiro couldn’t do deliberately back when he was fat. He was twice Keith’s current size—maybe not anymore, depending on how much weight he’s gained since Shiro got back home—and Shiro would’ve balked at the idea of even _trying_ to cram this much food into himself. He only could’ve managed it by eating while distracted (especially if Keith had been the one distracting him), or while too emotionally messy to stop himself.

More than that, though, is the promise of what’s coming: after getting five cookies down in quick succession, Keith sighs contentedly and gives his tummy a firm pat. Ripples course up through his flesh, all but begging for Shiro to come and touch them already—and this time? He can hope to do that because he knows it’s coming for him. He’s _going_ to have his hands all over Keith, as soon as Keith decides he’s ready, and it won’t be any kind of wrong.

Maybe this distinctly isn’t how Shiro ever pictured getting his hands on Keith. Maybe there’s a mild damper on the situation because of why he’s getting this chance at all. Because this isn’t about him and Keith, not really. They are doing this for work. For money. As Akira and Sable, not as themselves, because there’s no way that Shiro would ever be so lucky as himself.

Could be worse, though, he supposes. At least he gets to touch Keith in any capacity, this way.

A few moments drag by, each one scraping along Shiro’s nerves like nails on an incredibly impatient chalkboard, and Keith must have gotten through at least ten cookies by now. Maybe more than that, but contacts or not, Shiro can’t quite tell from this distance. However many Keith’s eaten, though, he pauses. There’s no visible discomfort on his face—but they’re still really early in the process, so why would there be?—but there’s no obvious game afoot here, either—

Until he looks right at Shiro. Not at the left-hand camera, but at _Shiro_. The gleam in Keith’s eyes makes Shiro swallow thickly. Makes his cheeks flush so sauna-hot, it’s a miracle that he doesn’t boil from the inside out. Keith licks the chocolate crumbs off his upper teeth, flicks his tongue out over his lips. He holds the Oreo up like he’s showing it off on some home-shopping channel and he’s about to sell it for five easy payments of $19.95, plus shipping and handling.

Then, he twists off the top wafer. He quirks both eyebrows, holding up the separated sides of cookie. Shiro’s own eyes feel like they could bug straight out of his skull, and Keith’s perfect mouth curls up into a knife's edge smirk—undercut slightly by the chocolate smeared around the corners. But what that detracts from the sharpness, it only adds to Keith’s appeal. Makes him look so perfect and so perfectly kissable. Makes Shiro force himself to inhale slowly, deeply, evenly, and not go gasping like some horny, keyed-up teenager at their senior prom. He gets in another breath like that. Another breath that lets him feel like his nerves might steady.

Then, Keith raises the wafer with the cream straight to his lips. He pokes his tongue out ever-so-slightly, teases the tip up and down the unnaturally sweet white cookie-filling. Lapping at it like a kitten with a saucer of cream (albeit one who drags each lick out until watching him go makes Shiro’s nerves writhe in pain and need and _longing_), Keith never once takes his eyes off of Shiro—God, but he _cannot possibly_ know what he’s doing, can he? Keith’s just pulling out this kind of stunt because he wants a sense of how his audience might react when he has Shiro post this clip for them. He doesn’t mean anything by his actions, here. At least, he doesn’t mean anything that directly applies to Shiro or involves feelings for him that Keith doesn’t really have.

Not that it matters, ultimately. With a throaty chuckle, Keith sticks his tongue under a section of filling that he hasn’t licked at yet. In one quick, fluid motion, he pries the cream clean off the cookie and sucks it down with a smug, contented sigh. Popping both of the chocolate wafers into his mouth, Keith reaches for the milk and takes a long, deep swig straight from the carton. In any other situation, that would be low-key disgusting—but honestly, who cares right now? It’s not like Keith plans on sharing the milk with anybody, and his Adam’s apple bobs so beautifully as he takes his drink. Jesus, Shiro could be giving Keith so many hickeys right now, all over his beautiful, pale neck…

Except it isn’t time yet. Shiro perks up as Keith raises a hand, then slouches when all Keith does is comb his fingers through his hair. Another motion makes Shiro sit at attention again—but all Keith does is reach for the plate of brownies. Shiro can’t allow himself any grumbling that his mic could theoretically pick up, but as he watches Keith smirk and hold up the largest brownie on the plate—as he listens to Keith moaning around the first bite and tries not to let it got straight to his cock—Shiro is definitely complaining on the inside.

He just wants to touch Keith again already, is that seriously such a crime? Is he really _so_ _wrong_ for wanting to get his hands all over every inch of Keith’s plush, beautiful body? And if he _is_ wrong for that—if he’s wrong for the shiver that he bites back when Keith sandwiches an Oreo between two brownies, stretches his mouth as if he’s a snake and can unhinge his jaw, and chomps down on the concoction like it’s no big deal—then Shiro wouldn’t mind an actual explanation as to why?

Not that he _expects_ to get one, anytime soon. While Keith blissfully sighs around another bite of brownie, leaning back on the mattress and twitching his hips so his entire body jiggles, Shiro tucks his white fringe behind his ear and sets his jaw. He’s never actually gotten an explanation for why _any_ of his mostly secret kinks are wrong. The closest that anybody’s come to rationale has entirely rested on fat people being awful, and fat bodies being ugly, and any sort of pudge being perfectly repulsive to most people in contemporary American society.

_So, basically the same vanity-related reasons that you wanted abs_, Shiro’s brain reminds him, refusing to let him just appreciate the sound of Keith groaning into the rest of his brownie and sucking the chocolate residue off his fingers. It’s a fair enough point, for all Shiro’s mind could be a lot nicer in expressing it. He could also remember every other reason why he did this to himself—but then Keith tears into another brownie and it’s hard to think of anything but watching him, waiting to be summoned for the actual scene.

Keith practically inhales the next several brownies. How he even gets to taste them, Shiro has absolutely no idea. He’s eating more or less mindlessly, and if not for the eager gleam in Keith’s eyes every time he reaches for another brownie, Shiro wouldn’t think he’s enjoying this at all. He doesn’t grin in victory or tease the cameras that much. He isn’t speaking, and sooner or later, his moans start bleeding into each other, sounding more or less the same.

Still, it’s fascinating to take in. Aside from the way it makes Shiro’s cock twitch with threats to rush things on him, there’s an artistry to Keith’s approach. He wraps one hand around the plastic jug of milk, uses the other one to stuff brownies in his face. While he’s chewing, he takes short drinks of milk. Swallowing lets him catch his breath a little, and allows him a moment to rub circles around the swell of his tummy. This usually means tugging his t-shirt back into place. It’s riding up on him something fierce, inching further and further up his middle with every treat that Keith scarfs down. Before Shiro knows which way is up, there’s more plate left than brownie, and Keith is grinning at him again.

It’s a grin that Shiro’s seen before, if not exactly in this context. Wide and bright and gleaming, fully aware of the potential lying ahead of them tonight, Keith’s grin screams, _“Hang on tight, Babe. Here is where things get interesting.”_

Whether or not it’s interesting for anybody else when Keith reaches for the popcorn, Shiro can’t take his eyes off of him. He doesn’t spend too much time crunching down the handfuls that he seizes up—it’s probably meant more as a palate-cleanser than anything else, a nice break for his tongue and his stomach so they don’t get overwhelmed by sweetness—but whatever Keith thinks he’s doing, Shiro’s riveted. His eyes can’t decide whether to focus on Keith’s mouth—the chipmunk way his cheeks puff up when he stuffs them full of food, the way they seem to inflate when he gets chewing—or on his stomach, watching for even the smallest sign that it looks any bigger…

God, if he’d please stop holding out and summon Shiro in already—but apparently, that’s not in the cards just yet. Instead, Keith tears open the pack of dark chocolate Milanos with the raspberry flavoring and dives headlong into scarfing them down. He makes quick work of it, taking each one down in two bites with a quick sip of milk—but there’s no way to conceal the way that he starts groaning. No way for Keith to hide the way he presses his fingers into his tummy in between bites and struggles to keep breathing evenly. Even if he _wanted_ to keep any of this secret, Keith couldn’t manage it. Jesus, his belly gets so much rounder as he fills it up, as he crams more and more into himself and yet keeps going—

Clamping down on his mouth—biting down on his index finger—that’s the only way for Shiro to keep from making a sound. From well and truly derailing the shoot, this time. He swallows the yearning little whine that bubbles up in the back of his throat. Keeps himself from coughing—which would ruin so much more than the shoot because it could all too easily lead to red azaleas flying everywhere and then Keith wouldn’t want to do this anymore—and he couldn’t say _how_ he does it? But somehow, as Keith polishes off the entire pack of Milanos and rips into a second one (the classic milk chocolate ones), Shiro manages to restrain himself. He manages _not_ to wreck up everything between himself and Keith by making noises that would clue Keith in about what’s going on inside of Shiro.

Could Shiro trust Keith with that knowledge? He absolutely _should_.

Does that knowledge ever need to be Keith’s problem? Definitely not. He never asked for it—for anything that could potentially come out of his best friend being head-over-heels in love with him, for said friend having been that way for long enough that memory strains to imagine a time when Shiro wasn’t—and Keith has his own difficulties to deal with. He shouldn’t need to clean up Shiro’s mess.

Not that he’s exactly handling difficulties, at the moment. Moaning around the cookies as he eats them, Keith seems so blissed out that he could easily be getting fucked right now. If Shiro didn’t know any better, he might guess that Keith had put in his remote controlled, vibrating plug—because the sounds Keith makes are a few shades too deep, a few hairs too close to actual orgasmic noises, for them to simply be coming out of cookies. Literally no cookies in the entire history of humanity have ever been good enough to merit a response like this. He sells it well enough that Shiro could almost buy the idea of Keith getting turned on by the food alone. It’s ridiculous and it would never happen, but Keith almost makes Shiro believe it _could_.

By the time Keith’s halfway through this new pack, though, his squirming gets stiffer. There’s a tension under each note that he whines. Instead of rubbing at his belly, he leans back and palms at his crotch instead, and… Oh. Well, alright then, that definitely is… Keith’s hard. No two ways about it. That is an erection insisting upon itself, pushing up against the nylon of his gym shorts and batting against the increasingly swollen underside of his tummy when Keith shifts in the exact right way to bring them into contact.

Biting back another gasp and swallowing with a mind to smother it, Shiro is so unspeakably glad for how big his hands are. At least he can _mostly_ hide the way his cheeks flush warm, simply from watching Keith wriggle. From listening to him whine, each time he arches his back and pooches his belly out toward his crotch. From seeing the way his stomach stretches out his t-shirt and makes it ride up so much further—and then from seeing the glimmer in Keith’s eyes and the way he smirks.

Keith’s hands drop to the shirt’s hem and try to pull it back down to meet his waistband. Defiant—not to mention unable to cover Keith’s middle like he’s trying to make it—the fabric rides up all over again. He whines in protest as he tries to suck in that gut, and watching him makes Shiro feel like his brain’s been replaced with white noise and nothing else. Hearing that sound—the tight, sharp way that Keith’s breath comes out of him as he keeps trying to pull his swollen belly back and make it smaller—God, that goes right to Shiro’s crotch, makes his dick twitch with interest that he needs to hold back in case Keith isn’t ready for him yet—

Then, Keith makes the sign. He flicks his wrist so the side of his hand thwacks into the lower curve of his stomach. As Keith’s flesh jiggles, Shiro nods in understanding. Time to shine. To prove that he can do this, exactly like Keith and Lotor were worried that he maybe couldn’t.

He doesn’t have long. Not having been summoned. But as Keith leans back, Shiro has a moment to work any knots out of his back and shoulders. To make sure that he still more or less has his breath about him—has it under control enough that he won’t start hyperventilating once he tries to get into the scene—and to go over the lines that he’s supposed to say. Or the motivation he’s supposed to have, since Keith refused to give him a proper script. He isn’t doing this as Shiro, now. He needs to be Sable, whatever that’s supposed to mean, and unlike Shiro, _Sable_ doesn’t get so hung up on watching Keith eat that he forgets everything else.

“Hey, little man,” Shiro says, still hovering on the edge of the scene, away from any of the cameras’ eyes. “What’s up.”

Keith doesn’t hold his unimpressed expression too terribly long. Still, it’s enough. He lets Shiro see the way his eyes glaze over and the way his lips go flat. Shiro’s heart twists as if it’s getting hit with lightning. Whether Keith’s making that face over Shiro hanging by the periphery or because that opening line was completely idiotic, that probably doesn’t matter. He’s not happy with his scene partner, at the moment, because he expects Shiro to do so much better than this—and he isn’t wrong for wanting that. How could he be?

Rather than give Shiro a verbal response to work with, Keith slouches and pooches his stomach further toward his lap. He places one hand on each side of his belly, kneading at the mound he’s built up so far and giving up a series of breath moans, each time he finds a spot where his belly’s particularly full. Where he has more food-baby than soft pudge. Jesus, would it _kill him_ to talk to Shiro openly, or give him more of a hint of what he wants—

“_Akira_,” snaps out of Shiro before he can think to stop himself. He doesn’t know what he’s thinking, or what part of him takes over. But it moves him into the scene—he only stops short of getting right up by Keith because there’s a tray-table in his way right now—and he folds his arms over his chest as he arches an eyebrow down at Keith. “What’s all this, little man?”

Dropping character for a hot second, Keith nods his head toward… Oh right, the cameras. God, how could Shiro forget _that_?

As he cheats toward them better—gives them more than a profile shot and lets them actually get a decent glimpse of him—Keith tries to make that signal work. Tries to weave it into the scene so that his viewers might not pick up on what’s really happening. He digs his hand into his belly harder than he’s done so far today. Presses into his own flesh like he’s mashing the buttons in _Mortal Kombat_ or trying to beat back a Whack-A-Mole. God, that gets such a deep moan out of him that Shiro can only barely fight off a gasp. Then, the way Keith throws his head back, the way his whole neck quivers with the force of the groan escaping him—

“Doesn’t really answer my question, tubby,” Shiro points out flatly. He can’t tell how close he is or isn’t to properly deadpanning at Keith—but the knowing, eager gleam in Keith’s eyes makes it feel like maybe Shiro isn’t doing so badly with this. Maybe he can keep this momentum going—“I mean, I’m no stranger to bulking up, Akira. But this?”

Shiro flicks a wrist like Lotor would, gesturing at everything spread out on Keith’s bed and tray-tables. From the crumpled white paper wrappers that formerly cupped around the Milanos to the package of Oreos, looking like it has quite a bit more open space than Shiro expected it to, even after watching how Keith ate those cookies… From the brownie-plate and how it’s practically empty, with maybe four or five treats left on its glimmering white porcelain, to the still-untouched box of cupcakes, sitting there like Keith’s waiting for the exact right moment…

As impressed as Shiro is with the sight of things—the state that Keith’s left his quarry in without seeming to try that hard—Sable isn’t Shiro. Sable’s reactions cannot be the same as Shiro’s would be. When Keith shrugs as if he has no idea what they’re talking about, Shiro wants to kiss him—but Sable needs to sigh in exasperation. It isn’t really Shiro making that sound and it isn’t Shiro slouching at the hips while giving Keith an expression that (Shiro hopes) combines deep displeasure with annoyance and a note of exhaustion. None of that is Shiro. It’s all a series of character choices and Keith knows this.

“You _do_ remember that you’re supposed to _cut_ at some point, don’t you?” His eyebrow arches higher of its own accord, and that makes Keith pout up at Shiro as if he has no idea what he’s doing. Okay, so they’re playing it that way, with Akira feigning innocence—“I explained that to you when you first _started_ this, little man. I distinctly told you that the only way to get what you said you wanted? Was to keep working out while bulking, then cut back so you really make that transformation happen.”

Saying these things, Shiro drawls and it almost slips into the voice that he uses when affectionately making fun of Lotor. The accent’s pretty far off, but the general timbre of it all gets close enough. Worse, he knows where he’s getting these words: he heard them from guys at the gym out in Los Angeles. His throat coated up with a slimy film of shame, each time someone made a so-called joke about Shiro bulking without remembering to cut, or how he must’ve forgotten to cut for the past ten years. Every time somebody thought that he’d be cute by ribbing Shiro about his size as if he didn’t already know how big and fat he was… Every time some guy thought it was hilarious to rub Shiro’s face in how much work he had to do before his body would be anything like what he wanted…

God, hearing them go on like that made Shiro want to work himself ragged. Lift until his arms burned and his elbows ached. Run until he made himself get sick and he could feel his heartbeat throbbing in his knees. More than once, he would’ve done so if not for having Lotor there to pull him back…

Shaking out his ponytail doesn’t help Shiro feel any more grounded in the here-and-now. Tucking his white fringe behind his ear rids him of those unwanted memories, but doesn’t help him to stop wondering about how Lotor might take that voice, should he ever decide to watch this clip—but lest Shiro make things get too awkward by saying nothing… Lest he slip up and allow too much dead air into the room, he makes himself spit out:

“Have you even _looked_ at yourself lately, Akira? Have you been ignoring every reflective surface that you come in contact with—”

“_Ugh_, I know what I look like, Sable,” Keith snaps. “Maybe I just don’t _care_.”

Rolling his eyes, Keith reaches for the Milanos again. Shoves two of them into his mouth at once and moans as he makes himself get through chewing them. How he can do that without choking, not even once—Shiro allows himself to gape, whether or not it’s what Sable should do in this situation. How can he help it, though? Keith’s cheeks aren’t even at their fullest, but when they puff up like that, stretching to accommodate two cookies and to let Keith chew them? God, he’s beautiful—

And then, he’s arching both eyebrows with an unspoken dare and… Oh, right.

As he nudges one of the tray tables aside, Shiro manages to close his mouth without cringing. Manages to keep his face reined in, stuck in something close to a neutral expression, all flat lips and eyes that aren’t doing much of anything. He isn’t entirely off-book yet, but he has to be careful. Sable’s not supposed to be humiliating Akira for his weight gain. Not in this clip, anyway. He and Keith didn’t negotiate that, so Shiro can’t break something like that out on Keith in this particular shoot.

Instead, he slinks to Keith’s side. Tries to keep cheating toward the cameras as he settles next to Keith on the mattress, as his hand wanders over to the underside of Keith’s tummy. _Jesus_, but it’s a struggle not to gasp—not to react too strongly in _any_ direction—when he cups his hand around that pudge. So soft in some places, but so hard in others. Swollen from the food and the milk, never mind from how quickly Keith’s crammed these treats into himself. But Sable isn’t supposed to be impressed, so Shiro only allows himself to smirk and chuckle lightly. Airily. Almost noncommittally.

As Shiro splays his hand over those curves more fully, Keith’s cheeks flush bright pink. Even so, he’s used to being in front of a camera like this. He knows what he’s doing and he knows how to play cold. How to play like he doesn’t nearly gasp when Shiro presses his palm into that beautiful, warm, distended flesh. As if Shiro isn’t doing anything worth notice, Keith fixes his posture, butts his tummy back against Shiro’s hand, and continues digging through the Milanos until he empties this second pack. He tosses the empty container toward the foot of his bed and as it skids across the comforter—as it plummets to the floor—Keith reaches for the popcorn.

He could say something before stuffing it into his face. Instead, he gives Shiro a _Look_, as if he’s pointing out that Shiro has the ball now and asking what Shiro means to do with it. Something curls Shiro’s lips up into a smirk that, dimly, he hopes looks halfway playful. Whatever that something is, it drags another chuckle out of him as well. Caressing Keith’s belly, he brushes his hand up and down the middle of it, not rubbing him in a way that might grant him some relief but teasing him with the lightest of touches.

“Y’know, you’ve got a point, Baby,” Shiro says so easily that he doesn’t think he’d trust himself with anything right now. “Now that I’m up close and all? You haven’t gotten all that big… Most people probably wouldn’t even _notice_…” More gently than Keith probably wants, Shiro thwacks his belly. Taps it only just enough to get some ripples jiggling through his flesh. “This little thing must’ve taken you so much effort to build up—”

“What _little_ thing? What the Hell is even _little_ anymore about me?” Keith balks, but for a split second? He lets a grin flash across his face.

Shiro’s heart somersaults up into his throat from simply seeing that. He’s doing a good job. Maybe he isn’t going far enough yet. Maybe he’s still new, both at doing porn and admitting that he enjoys these kinks (or even getting in the vague vicinity of admitting to a thing like that). Maybe there’s still so much that Keith expects from him as a costar—but Shiro _isn’t_ doing badly. He’s getting _something_ right about this arrangement. He’s doing _something_ that Keith appreciates and _something_ that Keith must want more of from him.

He has no idea how he keeps himself from planting a kiss on Keith, right here and now. But instead of giving in to that impulse—instead of letting it take him over and derail everything—Shiro jostles Keith’s tummy. Shakes that pudge not quite gently, but nowhere near as hard as Keith would like. That makes Keith squeak for him and try to suck in his bulging gut enough to get it away from Shiro’s hand. That turns into a whine as his body catches up with the way he’s reacted—as his stomach reminds him of how full he’s made himself and groans because it resents being treated this way, resents the expectations that he’s putting on it—and God, the way Keith blushes is adorable.

When he sighs and lets his belly surge back out to its full glory, his shirt rides up further than it has all day, exposing a wide strip of flesh. Although Keith’s still pale overall, his stomach is getting so pink from the pressure of letting him fill it up like this. Pressing his fingertips into a spot where Keith’s poor tummy feels especially stuffed—feeling something hard underneath his touch instead of the softness that jiggles up around Keith’s chest and down around those gorgeous, chubby thighs—Shiro leans in as if he means to kiss Keith.

Instead, he stage-whispers as Sable, “You heard me. I meant exactly what I said about this—” He squeezes Keith’s belly, even if he’s a bit too stuffed for Shiro to get his hand around a proper roll of fat. “Cute. Round. _Little_. Thing.”

As Keith screws up his face into an aggravated pout, his cheeks go such a pretty shade of candy apple red. Shiro’s nerves itch as every fiber of his being screams out at him to yank Keith close and _kiss him, kiss him, kiss him already, he’s too beautiful, don’t miss this shot, and anyway don’t people expect some kind of kissing when they watch porn _—but he swallows that desire. Tracing his hand up Keith’s stomach, Shiro edges the t-shirt up even further. Lets it rest on the upper curve of Keith’s middle, right beneath his chest.

Next step, Shiro turns his eyes and hand toward the waistband of Keith’s shorts. Elastic though it is and even though the rolls of Keith’s stomach squish and crunch it down, it’s still keeping him more contained than can be entirely comfortable. Certainly more than Keith’s subscribers likely want to see in a clip like this. So, Shiro eases his fingertips into Keith’s shorts. He trails them along Keith’s warm, soft skin and only goes far enough to get under Keith’s waistband with enough of a hold to move it out of the way already.

Shiro stretches it out—slowly peeling the fabric off Keith’s skin—then eases it down—going oh so slowly, and God, he could kick himself for dragging this process out, but the way that Keith whines at even the lightest touch is too good for Shiro to pass up—and finally, he hides the waistband beneath Keith’s underbelly, the spot where the rolls of chub along his midsection stick out and slope into the rest of his skin, even given the starter-sag that he’s been getting. The spot where, if Keith keeps getting bigger, his belly will droop down even more, dangling over the waistbands of anything he wears unless Keith forces himself to get his jeans up right on that chunky waistline, forces himself to suck in enough that he can get his pants zipped and buttoned—

God, that thought makes Shiro’s cock give up on holding out. Or maybe it’s the way Keith pouts at him, face screwing up with desire—or at least an incredibly convincing façade—as Shiro cups his underbelly, drags his fingers along that warm, soft pudge. Maybe it’s the way that Keith’s underbelly doesn’t show hardly _any_ signs of how much Keith’s stuffed himself, still so plush and squishy, giving way so easily underneath of Shiro’s fingers, while most of Keith’s belly is stretching tight and taut around the food he’s eaten. He should’ve taken it easier at breakfast, knowing that they were shooting a stuffing clip today, but he didn’t because when does Keith _ever_ acknowledge his own limitations willingly. Maybe it’s the thought of that, the thought of how Keith stuffed himself full of two three-egg omelets and an entire pack of bacon, only to turn around and pull this stunt for the sake of the video—

Either way, whatever’s winding him up about this, Shiro bites back on any sound that might slip loose as he finally gets hard. For good measure, Shiro taps at a doughy spot that he stumbles into along Keith’s side, shaking Keith’s entire gut with just that little bit of force. His softer parts jiggle as much as ever (breathtaking, considering how full Keith must be getting), while the places where he’s stuffed himself the most bounce, bobbing around so slowly, it looks like even reacting to the impact of Shiro’s hand—even moving where Shiro’s hand pushed them—takes too much effort and energy for Keith’s sluggish, heavy flesh.

But however his body’s taking this or isn’t, Keith slouches back, keeps himself propped up on his palms, and lets out a bone-deep sigh. Allows his gut to flop out even more—and Shiro can’t help boggling at that for a moment. He hadn’t realized that Keith was even trying to suck in. Then again, looking at Keith’s stomach now, Shiro can’t imagine that anyone would think Keith was pulling his stomach back. There’s so much heft to it right now, sucking in would barely accomplish anything.

“Mmm, see what I mean, Baby?” Shiro teases, thwapping the backs of his fingers into the side of Keith’s pudgy tummy. “_Little_.”

Of course, he’s lying. Brought to light and hanging out like this, Keith’s paunch looks anything but _little_. Without the shirt wrapped around his middle, keeping this gut _somewhat_ restrained, his belly spills into the open, blossoms out in ways that the shirt _almost_ let Shiro believe Keith’s middle wasn’t capable of doing. Pooching like this, it almost hits Keith’s thighs and definitely grazes against his crotch. If Shiro couldn’t _see_ that happening, then the way that Keith squirms—the way he wriggles and tries to lean back as if that’s really going to help this situation—would definitely clue him in to what’s going on in the vicinity of his best friend’s pants.

Keith is beautiful, no question. In Shiro’s eyes, he would be the most beautiful guy, whatever he did to himself and however he felt best in his body. But the sight of him sitting on his bed like this, so plump and so exposed—it makes Shiro salivate, eager to kiss that big, round belly and wrap his mouth around Keith’s dick.

But he doesn’t. Not now. Because Sable wouldn’t do something like that to Akira, at the moment, so Shiro can’t give himself that kind of pleasure. He takes a deep breath to steady himself—it’d work better if he allowed himself to take it slowly, but they don’t have that kind of time—and kneads at Keith’s stomach. Rubs his palm up the center of it while his fingertips dig along the side. Shifting around—moving to angle himself _just so _and slip behind Keith—he only lets go of Keith so he can reach over and grab the pack of Oreos and the box of cupcakes.

They end up on the mattress by his thigh while Shiro coaxes Keith into leaning back against his chest. Trying to sit so that Keith’s belly keeps pooching out is far from the most comfortable thing that Shiro’s ever done. Even with Keith’s warm weight slumping on his abs—even praying that Keith doesn’t feel his erection or that he doesn’t nudge too much into Keith’s back—Shiro can’t shake off the awareness of how much his back _does not_ like this position. If he could sit in a better position—namely: one that doesn’t involve his back making out like he has a bunch of obnoxious, angry, invisible gnomes digging at his spine with pickaxes—then this setup would be perfect. Something that Shiro’s dreamed of for he doesn’t even want to think how long.

But as he presses a toned, muscular thigh against Keith’s pudgy side—as he bites back a shiver at needing to stretch in order to get his legs around Keith—Shiro doesn’t allow himself to care. Thank God he’s worked his core so well, or else he wouldn’t be able to hold this position at all. It’s hard enough to carry on without thinking about how Keith is wider than he is-now, even if it’s only slightly. Even once he got himself back under three-hundred pounds, Shiro never dreamed that Keith would feel like this against him, outside of the weird stress-dreams that he dares not speak of, lest someone—especially Keith—figure out just how much of an inner freak he’s kept buried underneath his moderately respectable veneer.

Of course, this isn’t _really_ Keith leaning against Shiro, but Akira leaning against Sable. Shiro isn’t _really_ getting to enjoy this contact—oh, sure, his hands might ghost up and down the sides of Keith’s belly, teasing at his skin instead of rubbing him _properly_… But this isn’t them. Not really. It’s their bodies and their minds playing characters whose relation to reality can only ever be tenuous at best. Not that this stops Shiro from copping a nice feel or seven, cupping one hand along Keith’s yielding, doughy underbelly while the other kneads at a tightly-packed spot around his belly-button.

Keith’s entire body seems to vibrate as he moans. That sound makes Shiro’s stomach twist more than enough for his liking, please and thank you—but Keith _trembles_ so nicely, and he slumps against Shiro that much harder (Shiro has to bite back a gasp as Keith _definitely, unmistakably, no two ways about it_ rubs against his cock), and he keeps moaning appreciatively, whenever Shiro’s fingers make their way to a spot that he wants taken care of. He struggles to catch his breath, panting heavily whenever Shiro eases up on kneading his flesh and the food-baby that he’s stuck himself with, letting his head loll back against Shiro’s shoulder.

God, Keith’s so blissful, right now. He settles into Shiro’s arms as if he agrees that he belongs here. As if it’s more than making a video for his subscribers and his patrons, even though it can’t be. Unbothered by anything, he writhes against Shiro’s chest in long, slow motions, getting the rolls of fat along his back all up on Shiro’s abs and pecs until it feels like there’s barely room for air between his skin and Shiro’s shirt. Even when he can’t keep down a belch, Keith moves with such grace that Shiro’s lungs itch like they could make him hack up red azaleas all over the mattress right now—and some part of Shiro wishes that he _would_, if only because this would end things. Make it so he wouldn’t need to feel Keith snaking against him like this while _knowing_ that it isn’t real and that he can’t touch Keith like this as themselves.

For several agonizing moments, Shiro forces himself to keep quiet. To keep rubbing at Keith’s tummy, making his flesh jiggle here and there, but mostly giving him the attention and relief he needs. To keep his wits about him because he’s gonna _need_ them for the next part of this. As soon as Keith settles down and mewls about wondering how Sable liked that, Shiro needs every ounce of resolve and brainpower that he’s ever been able to claim.

Humming faux-pensively, he leans down and noses at Keith’s hair, at his ear the edge of his chubby cheek… They never said that kissing isn’t allowed outright, so Shiro presses his lips into Keith’s jaw. Doesn’t work Keith over, not right now, because they have more important things to do—but Shiro can’t do this if he only appreciates the places where Keith’s gotten chubby. He can’t get through this if he isn’t allowed to shower Keith with other affection, too. After all, it’s only what Keith deserves.

“That was such a good effort, Baby,” Shiro tells him in a low, soft stage-whisper. “God, you feel so good—” As if it helps him emphasize that point, Shiro jostles Keith’s tummy a bit harder than he needs to—and he grins when Keith mewls in not-exactly-protest. More so when his abs feel a ghost of how much Keith’s middle must be jiggling. “You _do_ feel good, you know that? So full and soft—you’ve gotten so plump and chubby, how could you feel anything _but _good? You never need to cut if you don’t want to—but you’re still so _little_.”

Whining, Keith grabs onto Shiro’s arm with both hands, presses Shiro’s palm even further into his belly. He pushes Shiro’s hand into himself so forcefully that he makes himself groan, and he drags Shiro around, rubbing his own belly with someone else’s hand. It’s like Shiro doesn’t need to do anything aside from giving Keith a tool to make use of.

“_How_,” he snaps, “does any of this feel _little_?”

Good thing Shiro’s other hand is free. He doesn’t know what to say to that—so he grabs up one of the Oreos instead. Smirking, he holds it to Keith’s mouth. But instead of eating the cookie, like Shiro expected him to do, Keith bumps an elbow back into Shiro’s side.

“What are you doing,” he says in a way that isn’t clear on where Keith ends and Akira begins.

But Shiro is all Sable as he purrs, “You want help getting _bigger_, don’t you?”

He’s all Sable as he presses another kiss to the corner of Keith’s jaw, as he traces his lips up the curve of Keith’s ear, as he says, “You’re never going to get anywhere if you give up like this—”

“Who said _anything_ about me giving up—”

“Then why aren’t you eating?” A shiver courses down Shiro’s spine at the sound of his own voice. At the feeling like it’s coming from someone else and maybe some_where_ else, too. At the sense that his words might be filtering in from another reality. Still, whatever’s taking him over and moving him to tug himself closer to Keith’s back—whatever gets him to rub his firm stomach all over Keith’s soft back, to feel Keith’s flesh yielding as his muscle crowds in on it—Shiro hears himself saying, “C’mon, Baby… You _do_ love this, don’t you?”

His fingers nudge the cookie against Keith’s lips without pushing it all the way in. Without taking away Keith’s choice on how to handle this offer. Not that holding back much matters: Keith whines in a high-strung way that sounds so painfully, impossibly uncertain of everything that’s going on right now, and then he sighs contentedly as he takes the Oreo into his mouth. The warm, wet insides of his lips drag down Shiro’s thumb and fingers as Keith all but inhales the entire cookie, and Keith’s hands drop to Shiro’s knees. His touch can’t make up its mind on whether he’s bracing himself or caressing Shiro, but Keith reclines against him that much further, resting more of his weight on Shiro’s chest and stomach, trusting Shiro to keep them both upright…

That trust makes Shiro’s head swim almost as much as how heavy Keith feels, leaning on him like this. When Keith shifts against him, Shiro’s breath hitches in his throat. Doesn’t give him the time to try and pretend that isn’t happening. Doesn’t give Shiro the option of concealing his reaction, just like Keith _must_ feel Shiro’s erection [nudging] into the chub that he’s built up all along his back. But before Shiro can get lots in that thought, Keith whines at him for more.

Shiro nods, nuzzling at Keith’s hair as he does so, nosing at the back of Keith’s head. “Of course, Baby,” he promises, not so softly that the mics can’t pick him up, but hoping that it sounds like this voice is just for Keith to hear, no matter how many people buy this clip. “How much more do you want?”

“All of it,” Keith mewls, squirming against Shiro. When Shiro presses his hand into Keith’s stomach again, he groans—but this only makes him wriggle more intently. “Sable, please? I want it all… So much more… Oh my god, Sable, _please_—”

He stops talking when another cookie taps against his lips.

This one, Keith takes down in two bites, instead of one, but Shiro can’t blame him for that. It took Keith too long to chew the other Oreo, and they need to make quick work of this. Before Keith’s stomach refuses to let him take down any more—before he starts feeling like he’s too full to move and before he feels like could be sick—they need to stuff him with as much as they can. As soon as Keith frees up Shiro’s hand, Shiro grabs up another Oreo. When Keith’s done with that, he gets another. He kisses Keith’s jaw again, and as Keith takes on yet another cookie, Shiro pecks at the pulse point right below Keith’s that spot.

He doesn’t work Keith over as well as he could do—doesn’t move to leave Keith with a hickey because that wasn’t part of what they agreed to—but Shiro’s brain is failing him, refusing to let him access his his vocabulary, and he needs to give Keith _some_ kind of reassurance. Needs to let him know how well he’s doing and that _someone_ appreciates it, here and now, in a direct way that Keith usually doesn’t get from his clients and subscribers.

The package quickly gets emptier and emptier, as they go on, forcing Shiro to dig under the wrapper and get cookies out of the far edges. But Keith’s doing so well, and he keeps whining at Shiro to please, get him more. And really, how could Shiro resist something like that? The cookies add to the firmness of Keith’s tummy, make it edge out into Shiro’s touch as if Keith is bucking his hips and _trying_ to meet Shiro’s hand, trying to put pressure on Shiro in return. Of course, he isn’t doing that. Not right now. It’s simply that his belly’s expanding, stretching further and further out as Keith pushes it to its limits.

Each time there’s a lull—each time Shiro takes a second too long to make sure Keith gets fed—Keith whines as if he can’t go on. He moans about how full he feels and how he doesn’t know if he can eat another bite, only to change that tune as soon as Shiro gets back to him with another cookie. Sucking down the second half of one of them, Keith lets his mouth slip around Shiro’s fingers again. As he’s chewing, he sighs and it sounds as heavy as he feels on Shiro’s torso. And when he finds another cookie waiting for him, Keith lets out a warm sound that makes him tremble against Shiro one more time. Something about it says that he could do this all day, and the fire he’s sparking up in Shiro agrees with that sentiment—

Until finally, Shiro’s hand hits plastic. He gropes everywhere inside the package, hoping for something. Even a crumb would be better than the dead air that he finds. But _Sable_ wouldn’t let himself or Akira get discouraged by something that merits celebration, and Shiro can’t slip up either. Can’t drop character or let his mild frustration impact how things go with the rest of the shoot.

Kneading the firm mound of Keith’s stomach with one hand, Shiro looks over at the center camera. He curls his lips into a smirk and holds up the empty package, lets the camera get a good look at it and then tosses it away. He doesn’t get it far—the stupid thing flutters to the floor and lands a bit off from the center camera’s tripod—but as Shiro looks up again, he spots something behind the camera. It’s a struggle not to furrow his brow—more so not to let himself stare too much at something other than Keith or the cameras—but on the other hand? Keith left his closet door hanging open. He left it at the exact right angle for Shiro to see the pair of them reflected.

As he rubs at one of the tautest spots along Keith’s middle, Shiro can’t believe that this escaped his notice—but it’s no matter. Nothing to be done now except make the most of what they’re working with. He can’t look his reflection in the eye—trying to for a single second sends a shock of _something cold_ straight to the pit of Shiro’s chest, makes his insides twist with a sense that he doesn’t even recognize the guy who’s staring back at him, eyes gleaming like a hungry wolf who’s spotted the most delicious-looking elk it’s ever seen—but God, the view he gets of Keith is simply fantastic.

Slouched against Shiro’s front, Keith looks bigger than he did before Shiro sat down. Not by much—at least, Shiro doesn’t think Keith looks too terribly much bigger—but his belly’s definitely looking a darker shade, more red than pink as his skin protests being made to strain as much as Keith’s demanding. More than that, his increasingly full stomach has distended further than Shiro would’ve imagined possible, even after watching Keith shoot his last clip. Even after watching him stuff his face in more relaxed settings—more for his own gratification than for the sake of a video clip—Shiro didn’t think Keith could make himself get quite this full.

Yet, as Shiro works his fingertips into the firm, upper curve of Keith’s belly—as he coaxes a belch out of Keith and makes him blush—he realizes that he should’ve seen this coming. God, Keith’s been eating so well, of course he can do this… Of course he could still get bigger, too. He must be expecting himself to go that far. Sure, his belly’s already edging closer and closer to his lap, already quite round. When Shiro splays both of his hands out, he can’t cover Keith’s gut entirely. Massaging the bulge of Keith’s tummy, Shiro bites on his lip, chokes down the gasp that almost slips free at the way Keith’s appreciative moan gives way to another belch without missing a beat. There’s nothing lacking about Keith’s progress or what he’s done so far today.

Even so, as Shiro squishes both of his hands into Keith’s paunch—into the center as well as that rock-hard upper curve—he puts on the airs that Sable would. He doesn’t sigh contentedly, so happy to be touching Keith, but tries to get a more pensive sound. Letting his palms drift up and and down Keith’s tummy, his pudgy sides, and for one brief moment, those wide, soft hips, Shiro forces his lips to stay as close to pursed as he can get them. As close to flat and expressionless as they’ll go while he’s touching Keith’s body, feeling up Keith’s heat and feeling his weight—

“Such a good start,” Shiro tells Keith in a voice that he _hopes_ sounds beguiling, like he wants to egg Keith on and get more out of him, like he’s encouraging but remains unsatisfied. But he’ll take any sound, he guesses, as long as he doesn’t come off like he’s some heart-in-throat middle school idiot who’s asking Keith to dance to the next slow song that the DJ plays. “But I know you can do even better than this…”

“’m not big enough yet?” Keith asks, and thanks to the mirror, Shiro gets to watch his eyes go wide. There’s one flash of a moment—barely even long enough to fill an entire second—and in it, Keith almost looks like he believes Shiro. Like he might cotton on to Shiro’s underlying intent in agreeing to literally any of this. A sheen of sweat glimmers on his forehead, and Shiro can’t tell if Keith’s cheeks are so red because he’s blushing or because it’s taking that much effort for him to keep eating. Whatever the truth is, though, Keith pants out, “How can I—are you serious—how are you—”

Shushing softly, Shiro eases Keith all the way out of his shirt, nudges his arms up so he can pull the thing off. He dabs at Keith’s forehead, nuzzles at his hair again, whispers a string of words he can barely decipher for himself about how well Keith’s doing and how Shiro—no, wait, Sable… Shiro, too, but _mostly _Sable—knows that his Baby can keep going. Grinding one hand’s knuckles into Keith’s belly-button makes him groan. Pressing harder into his food-baby makes him whimper. Twisting around to get the right angle, Shiro leans down to properly kiss Keith’s cheek and teases his fingers along the soft pudge of Keith’s underbelly. He ghosts the back of his hand along the bulge around Keith’s crotch, bumps ever-so-gently into that firm erection but not_ so_ gently that Keith can get out of noticing…

When Keith lets slip another moan, Shiro raises a cupcake to his Baby’s lips. Keith doesn’t notice it until he finishes that moan—until the tension seeps out of him and lets him slump against Shiro harder and heavier than he’s already done—and once he _does_ see the confection waiting for him, he furrows his brow and blinks at it. He takes a deep breath, but for a moment, all he can do is let himself gape and slowly shake his head.

“Sable,” he breathes. “This is too much… You’ve gotta be crazy, I can’t do it…”

Different circumstances would make Shiro take that pleading at face-value. If he didn’t know the ropes of this kink… If he hadn’t watched so many other people’s stuffing clips and only dreamt of doing such a thing with Keith, never thinking that it could happen to them for real… If he and Keith hadn’t discussed safe-words before getting started, and agreed that a simple protest like this isn’t the same as Keith calling things off… In any of those situations, Shiro would hear Keith saying something like that and assume that it was truly time to stop.

But Shiro _does_ know better, now. He and Keith _have_ discussed safe-words—and he knows better than to think Keith’s calling things quits. While Keith squirms against him—Shiro can’t quite ignore it, but God, does he fight his body about _keeping his reactions to himself _—Shiro gives him a soft, almost noncommittal hum. As if he can’t tell that Keith is doing anything, he peels the pastel pink wrapper down off the cupcake.

Once he’s exposed enough for Keith to get a decent bite, Shiro presses it closer to Keith’s lips.

Instead of eating—instead of even licking at the frosting—Keith flinches as if the cupcake’s tried to smack him.

Shiro stifles the sigh that tries to claw its way out of him. Settles for giving Keith a reassuring _ssssh_ instead. He drops his free hand back to Keith’s tummy and rubs gentle circles around that swollen mass as he coos, “Awww, Baby… You’re not quitting on me now, are you? After I made these special for you… I know how much you love them, how much bigger you want to get… You can’t do that by skimping on your calories like a quitter, can you?”

Shaking his head—and really selling the morose look that Shiro catches in the mirror—Keith mutters, “No… I can’t do that—”

“Right. You _can’t _get bigger if you don’t give in to that healthy appetite, the way you want to…”

Shiro kisses the back of Keith’s head as though this might encourage him any. As if he might make Keith feel better with a little more relief, Shiro presses at a particularly tight spot on his tummy. God, Keith’s really pushed himself today. Even if he doesn’t look as big as he could do, his belly feels so hard that Shiro almost lets himself believe the act that Keith is putting on. When he taps around Keith’s belly-button, he barely gets any jiggle from Keith’s midsection. Getting his fingers around a proper roll of chub might be a bit too difficult right now, but he has enough leverage to jostle Keith’s middle. He tries to be gentle—tries not to make Keith feel sick—but Shiro has a point to make. Said point needs him to emphasize Keith’s stomach.

“You love having this belly, don’t you,” he says without asking Keith a question because there aren’t any currently in need of asking. Even if there were in real life, _Sable_ shouldn’t have any questions that he could ask Akira—not least because Sable would know that this isn’t real. Wouldn’t get hung up on any nerves and need to force himself to purr, “You hate feeling so small and weak, that’s why you wanted to bulk up in the first place, Baby… I know how much it bothered you, being so skinny, never having any muscle to show for all the work you put in at the gym… You were always so lithe, so enviably petite—but all you ever wanted was to get bigger, wasn’t it?”

When Keith nods for him, Shiro urges the cupcake toward his beautiful mouth all over again—and he gives Keith an approving pat on the tummy as he chomps down on the sweet. As he takes more than half the cake into his mouth in one go. Frosting and raspberry filling smear all over his lips, but once Keith swallows, he licks that residue up with a yearning sigh. When Shiro presses the rest of the cupcake at him, Keith doesn’t hesitate; he throws himself headlong into finishing the treat. He moans around it, but makes quick work of chewing it up and swallowing. He must know that there’s only so much time before his body really _will_ start protesting, before it won’t let him do the rest of what they’ve got planned.

Because he knows the same thing, Shiro wastes no time in reaching over, taking another cupcake from the box. Trying to unwrap it as quickly as possible, he nearly fumbles and drops the thing on Keith’s chest. But he manages to keep his hands steady. Manages to keep himself under control—manages to make his limbs do what he wants _and_ manages not to get caught up in daydreams of marking Keith’s neck with the best hickey that he’s ever given anybody—and when Keith gnaws into the cupcake with a growl, Shiro manages not to gasp.

“Yeah, exactly like that, Baby,” he stage-whispers, hoping that it sounds seductive instead of silly. Sure, he’s probably doing fine about rubbing Keith’s tummy—and apparently, Shiro is easy enough on Keith’s subscriber’s eyes, so he probably can’t mess up simply sitting here and looking pretty—but making his voice sound like that… It just feels _weird_ and more than a little bit ridiculous.

Keith takes smaller bites with this cupcake, but Shiro doesn’t mind that. Gives him more time to rub Keith’s belly—more time to press his fingertips into the places where Keith’s feeling a bit more stuffed, more time to make Keith groan and belch as Shiro works out some of those spots where he desperately needs relief, more time to just let himself touch Keith’s body and get his mind around the fact that it’s _real_… Maybe Shiro can’t touch Keith as themselves, so that’s one way in which all of this is kinda fake… But that doesn’t slim Keith down or make his pudge evaporate. Doesn’t make him feel any lighter against Shiro’s chest.

Doesn’t matter, though, whether or not this contact _truly_ counts as real. Shiro can debate the metaphysics of it later, when he doesn’t have Keith in his arms, leaning on him as if he honestly can’t sit up on his own anymore, and mewling at Shiro as he finishes that cupcake. His eyes go wide again as Shiro brings another from the box for him—then again, this one’s bigger than any of its predecessors, so Shiro can’t blame Keith for that reaction—and Keith takes his first, smallish-looking bite in silence. He swallows without so much as a sigh about how good the cupcakes taste. He goes so quiet that Shiro has time to make a mental note about asking Hunk how to make these for Keith because it feels kinda shitty, taking credit for Hunk’s work, even if it’s a character choice for Sable.

After that beat of stillness, Keith finally gives up another moan. This one comes out a few notes higher than Keith might mean for it to get. Or maybe he _does_ mean to sound like his resolve is wavering. Maybe it actually is—but Sable wouldn’t let Akira falter in a moment like this, so Shiro _needs_ to come up with something. He needs something more than kneading at Keith’s belly, too. That can only help so much, and anyway, Keith can’t stuff his face while allowing himself to belch. Inspiration doesn’t strike until another quivering moan comes stumbling past Keith’s lips—

“Oh, _Baby_,” Shiro murmurs. “Baby, Baby, _Baby_… What’re you making noises like that for, Sweetheart? Trying to tell me that you’ve had too much? Or are you making those sounds because you’re a greedy little fat-boy and you want so much more?”

Instead of giving Keith room to answer, Shiro pushes the cupcake at his mouth. Not all the way into him—though it might look like that from the center camera’s perspective and vaguely, Shiro hopes it does—but close enough that Keith can’t talk around it. He could either take a bite or pull his head back, and Shiro fights to smother the shiver that courses through him when Keith chomps off the rest of the cupcake’s head. All of it goes in his mouth in one blow, except for a tiny smudge of frosting, hovering at the corner of his mouth.

“Knew it,” Shiro chuckles, half-breathless himself, even though he isn’t the one putting any actual physical effort into anything. “God, Akira, I know how much you love to eat—I know how much that sweet tooth kills you—but sometimes? I can’t even believe how _any_ of this has happened… How you’ve _allowed_ any of this to happen to yourself, I mean…”

As if it illustrates his point, Shiro taps his fingers along Keith’s stomach and gives him a quick smack. Not one with that much force behind it—Shiro has to be careful, lest he make Keith sick and ruin everything when they’ve come so far—but it’s enough that Keith’s belly bounces as much as it can. There’s enough behind the smack that Keith gives Shiro another one of those high-pitched whines. Shiro’s breath hitches in his throat, and he knows that they have more to do—they need to go through as many cupcakes as they can before Keith decides to move on to the next part—but… God, he doesn’t _want_ to help himself right now.

Despite his higher brain’s dim attempts at telling him not to, Shiro pinches Keith’s belly instead of rubbing it. He can’t find that much chub or softness to get his fingers wrapped around, not with Keith pushing and stretching his own sense of limitations until they might as well be broken—but fortunately, Shiro’s hands are big enough to make their situation work. Stretching as hard as he can, he manages to get a sizable handful of belly. Not quite of Keith’s supple pudge, but of skin, and a bit of fat, and the food-baby that Keith’s been growing throughout this shoot.

Clenching down around it all takes more effort than Shiro would’ve guessed—then again, how could he know any better? He never touched his own belly like this, when he was still relatively small enough to stuff himself past the point of fullness and stretch his belly out so much that he seemed to lose all of his softness… By the time Shiro ever let himself have a belly rub—whether he gave it to himself or accepted it from someone else—he was already so big and so fat that it didn’t matter how much he ate in one sitting or how much he stuffed himself throughout the course of an entire day… He could’ve spent an entire day stress-eating and cleaned out most of the kitchen before he noticed a goddamn thing; it didn’t matter. When he touched his own belly, no matter how full he was, Shiro’s fingers always found flab.

But Keith’s—oh _God_, just the feeling of Keith’s tummy could kill Shiro, right here and now. If reality shook out that way, then Shiro would die unfulfilled but about as happy as he ever gets. Even with how hard Keith’s belly is to his touch—even struggling to wrap his hand around enough of it for Keith to feel, fighting to make it yield when it’s so stuffed that Keith might as well have swallowed a boulder—Shiro can keep quiet, can keep up Sable’s façade… But he can’t entirely repress the hot, thick feeling that writhes through his chest, scraping all over the insides of his lungs, then pushing out until he feels like they’ve gotten too big for his rib-cage to contain them—

_Oh, God, no _—lest his lungs get a mind to make him start Hanahaki-coughing, Shiro bites on the inside of his cheek and jostles Keith’s tummy with a bit more force than he needs. Keith squeaks, at first. Then, he whines. Over in the mirror, he’s tomato-faced again, a darker shade of red than his poor stomach, ducking his chin as if there’s something to this that actually makes Keith feel humiliated, with a new round of sweat on his forehead that makes Shiro think of how vegetables at the supermarket look after the automated sprinklers go off.

That’s… not good. Maybe not as bad as it would be for Shiro to hack up red azaleas on Keith’s comforter, but still. Not good.

Letting go of Keith’s belly, Shiro traces his fingers gingerly around the spot where he just grabbed. Tries to make this touch feel like an apology, since Sable wouldn’t tell Akira that he’s sorry, so Shiro can’t currently do the same for Keith. As he pushes some of Keith’s hair aside, kisses the back of his neck and the top of his spine, Shiro’s cock throbs angrily, yearning for Shiro to pay his own desires some attention instead of trying to make nice when he doesn’t know for sure that Keith’s upset.

Not the desires that involve touching Keith, though. That’s all well and good—besides, Shiro ought to be getting more than his fill of feeling Keith up—but the way Keith groans and writhes against his chest makes Shiro’s heartbeat racket so loudly that there’s no way Keith doesn’t hear it, like it could wake up everybody in their building and make someone two floors above them call the cops. The lust wriggling through him wants more. The heat that pulses through his cock doesn’t know if it wants more or simply something different. Rubbing against Keith’s belly would be nice—or feeling his mouth, tight and wet and hungry, as he wrapped it around Shiro’s shaft—or having Keith’s hand curl around him as Keith fucked him into the mattress—

Pressing gently on Keith’s belly, Shiro nudges the remaining cupcake toward his lips. Thank God for the breathy little moan that Keith lets slip. Thank God for the way he tips his head back, resting it on Shiro’s shoulder as though it belongs there—which it definitely _could_, if that were ever what Keith really wanted. Kissing Keith’s temple, Shiro says so many silent prayers of thanks for these little things that _keep him grounded_ in the present moment. That won’t allow him to drift off, unmoored and without a map, into fantasies that will likely never come to fruition. Or if they do, then he’ll need to act as Sable for them, rather than as himself.

In the mirror, he doesn’t watch Keith’s mouth as he polishes off the cupcake. Instead, Shiro drops his gaze to the reflected images of Keith’s round, bright red belly. As he grabs up yet another sugary confection for Keith to eat, the spot where he grabbed Keith still stands out, brighter, pinkish-looking splotches against the red that’s spilled out along Keith’s skin as he’s made his belly expand so much. While Keith digs into the new treat, Shiro traces his fingers along Keith’s skin, looking for the smooth and slightly raised patches of his stretch-marks. Normally, they stand out so well against his pale skin—but they almost blend in with his belly when it’s this straining, pressured shade that makes Keith look like he’s close to bursting.

Cupcake number four goes down quicker than its predecessors, and Keith makes quick work of cupcake number five as well. Cupcake number six _must_ be the biggest one in the box—the one that accidentally got the most batter in its container after Hunk portioned out an even base, no matter how hard he tried to spread the remains out evenly—and Keith might well be getting close to his limit. He takes smaller bites of this one, though he doesn’t exactly linger on them. He’s not taking his time, which might create more problems for him? But Keith knows his body best, and Shiro’s most important task it to enable and encourage him.

The bump of an elbow on his side again reminds him: oh, right… He was going somewhere before he let Keith’s beautiful tummy distract him. Before he got caught up in copping a feel as if he might ever really get to enjoy this as himself and not his pornographic alter ego.

“I know _exactly_ how you’ve let this happen to yourself, Baby,” Shiro tells Keith, gently but not softly—not least because the mics need to be able to hear him, and _Sable_ wouldn’t be overly sweet about this with Akira. Splaying his hand out on Keith’s tummy again, caressing him without playing at anything but that touch itself, Shiro twists the cupcake so Keith can get a better angle for scarfing it down. “You’ve let yourself go because you _like_ feeling this way. You never wanted to bulk and cut—or if you did, you forgot about it as soon as you started getting chunky. The first five pounds, maybe the first ten? You thought for sure that you’d do things properly and come out with muscles like mine—”

Keith whines as he finishes cupcake number six. Whether or not he _means_ to cut Shiro off, he does. Unless he’s so caught up in the scene that he’s losing himself in his Akira character, then there might be a few subtextual notes for Shiro to pick up on as he peels the wrapper off of cupcake number seven.

Keith could simply be turned on, aching with arousal on top of what his cock is doing—in a magical fairy-land reality where everything is straightforward and sensible and nobody ever gets tangled up in other people’s rhetorical twists and double-meanings, and no one needs to worry about what anyone might mean because everybody already _knows_ and nobody misses the subtle cues and tacit aspects of any given conversation. Or possibly in the reality where Shiro can get along with his cousin’s boyfriend, which might as well be its own magical fairy-land, given the nerve-grating perpetual pain-in-the-neck Sven fell for.

Since Shiro doesn’t live in either of those realities, though, there must be some significance to the way Keith whines, to the taut, quivering note that comes out of him when he bites into number seven. He could be grousing about Shiro’s abs because he still isn’t used to them, not really, and more than once, Shiro’s caught him gawking in a way that he can’t interpret as anything but distaste and desperately wishing that Shiro hadn’t lost the weight…

Reclining on Shiro even more, somehow finding a way to get their bodies closer, Keith groans around another bite. In the mirror, he looks so contented—so why doesn’t he _sound_ blissed out? He could be pointing out that Shiro didn’t have muscles when he left for California, so Keith can’t have had any opinions about them, no matter what Akira’s thought about Sable’s physique or hasn’t, no matter what their history with each other might turn out to be, since Keith and Shiro haven’t mapped that out yet, and Keith’s usual style as Akira is so free-form that doing that kind of character work beforehand isn’t something he’d necessarily consider…

With a heavy sigh, he wraps his mouth around the remaining cupcake—and has to spit out the wrapper when it gets stuck along his teeth. It’s worth a chuckle, but Shiro can’t shake off the thought that something else, something incredibly displeased, lurked beneath Keith’s sigh. He could think that Shiro’s cutting it too close to humiliation that they haven’t actually negotiated, and simply want to drag him kicking and screaming back onto the course they plotted…

“God, of course that’s not enough for you, is it?” As he picks out cupcake number eight, Shiro pats Keith’s tummy. Gets a deep, crisp sound out of it as if he’s hitting a drum—and that makes his heart do backflips all around his chest, almost as much as the way Keith’s stomach bobs for him. But Shiro plays it cool because he has to, and splays his hand over Keith’s tummy. Puts a stop to any bouncing flesh by holding fast to Keith. “Everything that you’ve already eaten—how full your poor tummy’s getting—but you still feel hungry, don’t you?”

Keith shakes his head without saying anything, without surrendering any kind of noise. When Shiro kneads into the firmness of Keith’s stomach, he refuses to let himself moan or even belch. It’s like an electric shock coursing up Shiro’s arms, every time he finds a new spot on Keith to touch. Every time he finds a tight spot, and he _knows_ that Keith must be feeling something, too. Even if it’s just the physical aspects… Even if yearning doesn’t burn inside of Keith from having Shiro’s abs pressed up against his back… He _must_ be feeling something, enough for him to give up and let Shiro hear _some_ kind of noise from him.

Except he doesn’t give Shiro that satisfaction. He shakes his head again, and Shiro play-tuts right back.

“Oh, I think you protest too much, Baby,” he says, uncertain of where the words are coming from because there are too many possibilities. All he can do is focus on pressing into Keith’s tummy and nudging the cupcake up toward Keith’s lips. On easing his hand into Keith’s flesh and his food-baby, making his stomach yield to Shiro’s touch. “Beautiful, chubby bellies like this don’t just spring up out of nowhere… Athletic, skinny things like you used to be? They don’t go and plump up like this unless they let themselves go—and that’s exactly what you did… Ask me for advice on how to bulk, and soon, you find out how much of an appetite you really have… How much of a glutton you’ve had pent up inside you, this entire time… And you just can’t help yourself. Not that you’d want to, if you could. But as soon as somebody puts sugary sweets in front of you, Akira? You can’t even _pretend_ like you’ve got an ounce of self-control…”

While Shiro talks, Keith whimpers around every bite of cupcake number eight, and then around cupcake number nine. Even if Shiro can’t quite read it, he can’t miss the fact that subtext exists in everything from the way Keith groans to how slowly he goes about devouring the latter treat.

Maybe his breathing is exempt from that idea. He struggles to keep each inhale slow and even, but that’s probably more related to how stuffed Keith is than anything. But everything else about Keith? Oh, everything else says that Keith’s burning up with something that he isn’t saying, something that might be eating him up from the inside out. There’s gotta be something on his mind, something about this situation that’s rubbing out his exact last nerve. He could suspect (too easily and far from incorrectly) that Shiro’s digging into emotional places that, as himself, Keith definitely doesn’t like.

Keith’s whining could mean so many things that Shiro can’t imagine all of them. True, those levels might not _really _be there, but if they are, though? Shiro wouldn’t blame Keith for that, not after how many times he’s ever tried to tell Shiro not to care so much about how he looks, or his body, or his weight, or what other people think of him for any of that. Whatever the truth is, though, Shiro doesn’t get to think about it.

As he reaches for cupcake number ten, Keith taps his knee three times.

Shiro perks up at that sign, but he takes care about moving his hand. He lets it drop to the mattress, rubbing at Keith’s tummy with the other one. Then, he gets both of his hands on Keith, pushing on his belly. Massaging all the places where he’s so stuffed that Shiro almost can’t believe Keith hasn’t passed out in a food coma yet. But he has the steeliest resolve that Shiro’s ever encountered. If anyone could pull a stunt like what they came up with after stuffing themself so full that lesser people could have literally exploded? It would have to be Keith.

“God, you’re so good, Baby,” Shiro lets slip out. It wasn’t what he meant to say. But it’s not quite breaking character, so he digs his fingertips in hard and makes Keith belch. Doesn’t fight the hot, yearning sigh that comes out of his own lips. Caresses the heavy mound of Keith’s belly as he says, “You’ve eaten so well today, I know that you’ll get even fatter from all of this, but…”

He trails off. But just for long enough to steal a kiss from Keith’s pudgy cheek. Smirking, Shiro tells him, “You’re _still_ little, though.”

“Oh, is that _so_, Sable?” Keith snarls, and then huffs when Shiro nods.

Shuffling around—moving against Shiro, agonizingly slow and grunting with the effort, dragging it out and making Shiro feel every motion of the chub along his back, the way those rolls of fat pooch against Shiro’s abs and pecs—Keith sighs. It’s the same heated, impatient sigh he uses when he’s arguing with Lance and neither of them wants to give up and apologize. But there’s an edge to it, one that Shiro can’t decipher for the life of him.

Even knowing what’s coming, Shiro gasps when Keith drops into his lap, straddling his thighs. Not just from the impact or from the way Keith trembles against him when he groans. But the fact that Keith can still move at all? Much less turn himself around like this? It’s a miracle that Shiro keeps his head clear enough to put his hands on Keith’s thighs, giving him an extra bit of balance. He’s letting the cameras get a good shot of his back; they need a moment to linger.

Not too long a moment, though. As soon as Shiro dares to cop a feel—lets himself slip one hand closer to Keith’s crotch—Keith pushes him away. He grunts himself as his back smacks into the mattress. That grunt turns into a moan about halfway through as Shiro fails to tune out the way his cock yearns for satisfaction, the feeling of precome leaking out and edging down the head and shaft, how much he _wants_ Keith, wants to give him absolutely everything…

But the way Keith snakes up on him is even worse. Each motion moves like Keith’s trudging through hip-deep snow. He bears down on Shiro’s thighs, rubbing that plump ass against Shiro’s muscle like he knows it’s killing Shiro to feel this and doesn’t care. Keith couldn’t know that, but he bucks harder than he needs to do on Shiro’s hips and—worse yet—on Shiro’s crotch. Sure, he gets their cocks rubbing up on each other, through his shorts and Shiro’s pajama bottoms—but when Shiro moans for him, Keith’s eyes get that knife’s edge glimmer. He moans louder, kneading his ass against Shiro’s crotch, teasing Shiro with that low, thrumming, lusty sound as he inches all over Shiro’s body, only lifting up as he goes over Shiro’s hips, teasing against them without giving them any proper contact—

Until he thumps down onto Shiro. Right there, right on his hips, just above his crotch. Smirking like he’s bested the Devil himself, Keith picks himself up a little higher and drops onto Shiro _hard_. Hard enough to make himself groan and set his round, red, swollen belly bouncing.

Shiro’s breath hitched in his throat, as soon as Keith sat on him. He thinks he’s getting it back—as if Keith grinding on him, doughy ass all over Shiro’s bone and muscle, could somehow wake his lungs up again, remind them how to work and everything—and then Keith has to do it. Has to lean backward, rocking toward Shiro’s cock without full touching it. Making Shiro whimper only gets Keith to lift up again and inch further up Shiro’s hips—closer to his torso, closer to the surgical scars that his shirt’s still keeping hidden—and Keith grins like he’s daring Shiro to defy him.

Part of Shiro thinks he could stand to do that.

Another part of him thinks that he definitely _should_, just to see what Keith might do.

But when Keith hisses at him—_“What good are all those muscles for you, Sable? You’re at the gym how many times a week, and you can’t even fight off chunky, _**_little _**_old me? God, you skinny bitch”_—all Shiro can do is squirm, and whine, and buck his hips up at Keith’s ass. He doesn’t even know if that can get anything. If it does earn him anything, Shiro can’t guess what that could be.

As soon as he settles, lets his hips drop back to the mattress, he gets his answer: Keith crashes into him again, harder and heavier than ever.

Shiro groans when all Keith’s weight slams down on him. Struggles to make himself keep breathing as his hips rock up toward it. As his body screams for Keith to do that one more time, please, please, _please_. For Keith to pin Shiro down and make him feel _all of that_.

Keith’s stomach bounces as he takes up that silent offer, lifts himself up and drops onto Shiro one more time. Collides with him, all soft and heavy and hitting Shiro’s body as if Keith could crush him, right here, right now. Whether it’s the way Shiro curls toward that feeling—that heaviness—or the way he whimpers, something about his reactions makes Keith grin, flashing all his teeth like a shark, like he means to tear Shiro apart. His ass jiggles as much as it can, pressed so impossibly tight against Shiro’s body.

He doesn’t entirely know what he’s doing, letting the backs of his fingers find Keith’s cock. It’s like his hand’s on autopilot. But Keith grinds against Shiro’s hips—against his crotch—as if he doesn’t mind that touch. As if trying to extinguish any doubt that might remain for Shiro, he presses toward Shiro’s hand. Edges toward that touch like he’s trying to have Shiro jerk him off for real.

Whatever Keith’s going for, it doesn’t last long. Neither of them lasts long. A couple shifts of Keith’s ass on Shiro’s hips—a few moments of Shiro palming Keith’s erection through his shorts—and both of them are groaning. Heat knots up tight in Shiro’s chest, his stomach. It jerks on him, pulls all his muscles bowstring-taut, makes him gasp like he can’t catch his breath at all—then, the white hot rush as everything unknots and comes undone. As it courses over him in waves. As he groans, and slackens, can’t even ball his hands up in Keith’s sheets to keep himself anchored for another moment.

Keith keeps himself together better, but with the way he whimpers when he comes? Shiro has no idea how he manages it. How can he sit there on Shiro’s hips, still grinning in a perfectly Akira Crimson way? How can he still find it in himself to tease his ass along Shiro’s hips, or lift his hand, trailing the backs of his fingers down Shiro’s cheek? How can he shush Shiro as if actually trying to soothe him and go so gentle, as if Keith _isn’t_ the one who needs aftercare right now?

He doesn’t give Shiro any answers. Doesn’t clear up any of those questions for him.

Instead, Keith simply chuckles and purrs, “Not so little anymore, am I? You beautiful, skinny little _bitch_…”

* * *

Aftercare feels like it should probably be more complicated. Seriously, Shiro must be missing _something_.

Except Keith doesn’t seem like he’d agree with that. After a bit of extra posing, he pushes himself off of Shiro, flops onto the mattress, and goes so quiet, Shiro wonders if this might not be a nonverbal moment.

When he speaks again, it’s only to tell Shiro that he has some shea butter in his bedside table’s drawer and could really use some on his belly. Which makes sense, considering how much Keith ate and how much his skin must be protesting from this stuffing. Shiro kneads on his swollen stomach while applying the lotion—but when he tries to offer Keith a more thorough and more attentive belly-rub, Keith refuses.

“Kashi, you were great,” he says, “But I am _barely_ hanging on, okay? If I want a belly-rub after my nap? I’ll let you know.”

Fair enough, Shiro guesses. Keith’s snoring before Shiro’s even cleaned up half of the discarded wrappers and remaining food.

He isn’t grateful for that until he’s locked the bathroom door behind him.

Bracing himself on the sink, incapable of looking his reflection in the eye, Shiro feels like he might be sick. Since Hunk isn’t home and Keith’s not awake to hear it, Shiro allows himself to groan. Once he gets the feeling like there’s something squirming in his lungs, though, he wishes that it had been simple nausea instead. The feeling like tendrils scraping the back of his throat comes next, and when the coughs slam into him, Shiro doesn’t fight them.

By the time they die down, he has three fully-bloomed azaleas sitting in the sink, surrounded by a smattering of petals.

As he takes out his ponytail and shambles into the tub, Shiro doesn’t have it in him to sigh or roll his eyes or do much of anything aside from fumble with the water. Maybe a hot shower would feel better—maybe it’d feel more like a hug or let Shiro delude himself into thinking he’s anything but Keith’s co-star and platonic best friend—but Shiro runs the water as close to freezing as their building will allow.

He already takes cold showers after he hits the gym, or when he can’t get himself going in the morning, or when he wakes up feeling too tempted by all the junk food that Keith and Hunk keep in the apartment. Might as well use them for one of their more common purposes too. Maybe enough Keith-related cool-down showers can drown the Hanahaki out of him.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Lance is obnoxious in ways that he has not yet realized genuinely upset Shiro quite a bit, and Shiro and Ryou have some emotional Twin Time.

Ten days pass with as many cold showers, twice that many inches of snow dumped all over town, and an utter lack of red azaleas clawing their way out of Shiro’s lungs. He’s not out of the woods yet with this flare-up, if he remembers correctly—but there’s enough good going on that Shiro shouldn’t scoff about not being rid of his Hanahaki, yet. Progress is progress, right? For example, when Acxa won’t let Lotor brave a blizzard and slog over to the apartment by himself, Shiro gets his and Keith’s first clip edited and posted, and he doesn’t hack up a single petal.

Which he’d count as a win, if he could shake off a feeling that he can’t name. Hell, simply putting words on it would make everything easier. The fact that Shiro _can’t_ figure out what to call his own feelings probably indicates that something’s very deeply wrong with Shiro. Sure, Keith sometimes has the same problem, but he’s _autistic_. He professionally documented trouble with language and with parsing out his feelings. Nobody who has a sense of decency could hold Keith’s issues against him when it’s not as though he asked for them. He manages them fine, but he can’t make them go away. These are _reasons_ for Keith to have the trouble that he does.

All Shiro has is the sense that he needs to be doing better and an itch to go outside and run, no matter how cold it is. This makes Keith decide to hide his sneakers—_“Kashi, for the love of God. You got to the gym before it started snowing, you don’t need to go for a run. Especially not when you’re liable to slip on ice and break your leg, or sprain your ankle trying to plow through the snow, or something equally fucking stupid”_—and Shiro can’t blame him for that. He also can’t blame Hunk for rolling his eyes and demanding to know what what the Hell Shiro thinks he’s thinking.

Still, padding around the hallways in a pair of flip-flops isn’t the same as running. It gets Shiro out of the apartment but not out of his head, and his nerves feel like they’re fraying under the constant, droning _thwap! thwap! thwap! _of his sandals against his heels. All of Shiro’s focus has to go toward _not_ letting that sound drive him up the wall. By the time he wanders up toward Ryou’s apartment, Shiro doesn’t have his spare key with him and doesn’t remember how he even got here.

At least he’s lucky on one count: when Shiro knocks on the door, he hears someone startle and clatter like they’re falling off the couch. Maybe he shouldn’t be happy about that, given that they might’ve hurt themself—but at the same time, Shiro didn’t show up when no one’s home.

Unfortunately, Lance slouches on the door-frame and stretches out his arm as if he intends to block Shiro from getting inside. Arching an eyebrow doesn’t make him quiver, much less back down. Even though Shiro could toss the little twerp over his shoulder easily, Lance smirks like he’s the human incarnation of the greatest security system ever invented. Like he knows exactly how to keep Shiro out.

“What’s the secret password,” Lance drawls, rubbing at his nose, then burying a sneeze in the crook of his elbow. “Also, Ryou and Allura brought something home from that overgrown petri dish they call a college. I don’t think it’s _that_ bad, really? But you might wanna go home—”

“I _don’t_. I wanna come in and see my brother.” Although he doesn’t wilt under Lance’s pointedly arched eyebrow, Shiro does sigh for him. By way of acquiescing to whatever request Lance thinks he’s making, Shiro drags his fingers through his white fringe and starts throwing out words as they come to mind: “I dunno, _pie_? Death by chocolate? Groove? Heart? Frozen? Let it go? Mickey Mouse?”

When none of these works, Shiro has to fight himself to keep from groaning. “What are you trying to get here?”

“You made a lot of good _guesses_, I gotta give you that.” Puffing up his chest only makes Lance sneeze again. Taking a deep breath and squaring up his shoulders, he tries to make himself look less like he wishes he could just pass out? “But how do I _know_ that you’re the _real_ Shiro, and not his and Ryou’s long-lost, skinny triplet who works as a high-class male escort for shallow jerks who are only into guys with firm butts and rock-hard abs?”

Folding his arms over his chest (largely so he can’t jab his fingers through his own temple from rubbing too hard at this budding headache), Shiro huffs. He tries to give Lance a withering glare, something to let him know exactly how ridiculous he sounds right now. Aside from failing to make Lance relent, this makes Shiro’s lungs twist around in a prison of guilt that sends chills through Shiro’s spine. He keeps himself from shivering, but not from feeling heavy duty meat locker-levels of cold. 

Frankly, this is _stupid_. Of the two of them, _Shiro_ is the one who has more of a right to be upset, at the moment. He’s the one who’s getting barred from doing something inoffensive and simple because of _Lance_ deciding that this very second is the perfect time for hijinks. Not even very _good_ hijinks, either. He’s phoning in something ridiculous that gets on Shiro’s nerves but accomplishes absolutely nothing else. Whatever Lance thinks he needs from this, it’s obnoxious and as essentially Lance’s brother-in-law, Shiro at least deserves to get Lance’s best efforts.

“What do you want to hear _this_ time?” Shiro doesn’t allow himself to slouch—but the thought tempts him for a moment. “You want to subject me to some pop quiz to prove I’m not a robot clone or whatever?”

“Sure, why not. Start with why you didn’t tell Ryou and Allura I was totally full of shit in calling ‘Despacito’ a love song.”

“I don’t know, Lance. How about, ‘Because you’re my _friend_, and if they still haven’t tried to learn Spanish when they _know_ that it’s important to you? Then they can deal with you musically propositioning them in public.’” Before he can think better of it, Shiro chuckles and adds, “Also, I thought it was pretty funny that they believed you for so long.”

Grinning, Lance erupts in snickering—and only stops so he can sneeze into the crook of his elbow. “It _was_ pretty funny.”

“There, see? We agree about that—”

“Yeah, except _my_ Shiro doesn’t think _any_ of my jokes are funny—”

“That’s _garbage_, Lance. There’s a difference between, ‘Maybe you should’ve stopped flirting with Nyma, then she wouldn’t have handcuffed you to a tree’ or, ‘Can you _not_ make a dick joke while everyone is worried about Coran’—”

“Who was _fine_, by the way! Exactly like I knew he would be—”

“He could’ve gotten a concussion. It was _not_ the time for a _dick joke_.”

“Well, now I’m believing that it’s really you. Because you’re right back to hating my jokes—”

“I _don’t_ hate your jokes, Lance.” When Lance scoffs, Shiro stifles a groan and pinches the bridge of his nose. “If I hated your jokes, I wouldn’t have told you to use the, ‘Are you sure you don’t have any Cuban in you? Would you like to’ routine as an ice-breaker _with my brother_.”

“Hey, you might think this is stupid, Alleged Shiro. But I’m taking it very seriously!”

“Oh, yes, you’re a pinnacle of gravitas—”

“I’m talking this out with you instead of going back to burying my face in the couch, aren’t I?”

“So, tell me: why did you think it was _awesome_ that I encouraged your ‘Despacito’ prank—”

“Uh, because it _was_ awesome until you—”

“Until _you_ found out that I have abs now. Then, it was a _national crisis_ that I enabled you in—”

“I want assurance that _my_ Shiro hasn’t gotten _Winter Soldier_ed on everybody who gives a crap about him, okay!” Lance’s eyes light up with a smirk, even though his lips don’t curl. “I mean, it’s what I would do, if I were a supervillain. Y’know, take some poor, innocent fat guy who’s really unfairly down on himself… Use really shady comic book super-science to slim him down and buff him up… And while he’s shrinking and sprouting abs, I’d use different mind-control techniques to brainwash him and turn him to my side, no matter what his morals say—”

“Have you had your Adderall today?” Shiro sighs when Lance nods for him. “Too much coffee?”

“I was up and down all night, feeling like I was gonna puke from the smell of Blue’s litter, or from looking at Ryou’s monster movie posters—”

“I’m just saying. This sounds like an _awful_ lot of thought for how you’d turn me into a living weapon when that isn’t even _possible_—”

“How do _you_ know that it’s impossible?”

“Because the comic book science that you’re talking about _isn’t real_, Lance.” Shiro pinches his own elbow. It does nothing to make him feel less like punching a brick wall would calm him down. “Yes, there are different supplements and anabolic steroids. Yes, there are dangerously unsafe weight loss techniques—which, I remind you, I _did not use_. Yes, there are ways that you can emulate hypnosis or subtly influence someone in a way that resembles mind-control—”

“See! That totally could’ve happened to you, _hermano_, and you wouldn’t even know the difference—”

“No, but _Lotor_ would’ve known the difference. Then, we wouldn’t have made it home because he’d be stalking Sebastian Stan to see if he learned anything while playing Bucky that could maybe help fix me—”

“Lotor wouldn’t’ve seen the difference if you got to keep all your own memories and personality. They could’ve made you—”

“No, they _couldn’t_ have. Because what you’re talking about _does not exist_—”

“How do you _know_ that it doesn’t exist,” Lance huffs, pointedly sulking at Shiro. Without outright saying so, he demands to know why Shiro thinks he’s allowed to be so serious when Lance wants to have fun. “We live in a world where people hack up _flowers_ when we feel like someone doesn’t reciprocate our lovey-dovey smoochy feelings—”

“Oh my _God_, not this again.” Shiro grinds his thumb into the bridge of his nose. “You know what you sound like when you do this, right? You sound like all of those conspiracy theorist _weirdos_ that they put on the History Channel to talk about how aliens might’ve built the Pyramids.”

“Well, why couldn’t it have been aliens? Why couldn’t _aliens_ be responsible for Hanahaki existing—”

“Because they _aren’t_, Lance.” Shiro sighs, ready with additional logic because Lance never wants to listen to Occam’s Razor about this. “Currently, there’s no proof that aliens exist. Nothing that we’ve found, yet. And whatever life _is_ out there in space? Probably doesn’t care enough about human beings to make us cough up _flowers_.”

When this earns him a bemused frown, Shiro has to fight not to roll his eyes. “Come on. If you were an advanced alien species—if you had faster-than-lightspeed travel and technology that might as well be magic—why would you want to come out to an insignificant, blue and green backwater planet in an outer spiral arm of a galaxy that no one cares about, just to make the carbon-based, ape-descended dominant species completely lose control of themselves and start hacking up gardens because they feel like somebody doesn’t love them back? Literally what could they possibly get out of this?”

Lance considers that briefly, humming like he wants to sound pensive. “Because it might make them feel like living gods? Because they’re mad with power and they want to get a rush out of dominating a species who doesn’t realize what’s going on and couldn’t fight back, even if we did? Because we’re actually some kind of research colony and they’re trying to cure this disease in their own species? Because they’re harvesting the energy that our bodies generate by loving each other and forming social bonds, because it has magical powers or they need to solve an outer space energy crisis or something?”

When Shiro can’t find a response, Lance smirks and gives him a _come at me!_ shrug. “You want me to keep going, man? I’ve got more.”

“I’m sure you do,” Shiro deadpans. “You’ve been watching way too much anime lately.”

Lance holds up a finger. “One: no, I haven’t.” Then a second one. “Two: there is no such thing as too much anime, you goth trash freaking _nerd_—”

“When you start taking ideas that sound like anime plots and applying them to the real world? That’s when you’ve watched too much anime.”

“Not the fucking point, you buzzkill!” Lance throws up a third finger and squints at Shiro like he’s looking for any subtle sign that proves him right. “Point three: you _don’t_ know for sure whether or not the things I’m talking about are real. The fact that we’ve got Hanahaki? Means that comic book mind-control and super-science? Aren’t actually that implausible.”

Shiro could just walk away. A not-insignificant part of him wishes that he would.

But walking away wouldn’t let him see Ryou, though, so he takes a deep, steadying breath and makes himself look Lance in the eye. His shoulders try to sag and his hips attempt to slouch—but Shiro hugs himself more tightly, and steels himself. He only gives his shoulders room to hunch in on him like an agitated cat. He lets himself frown more deeply, so that Lance might _realize_ that he’s being perfectly obnoxious and wearing Shiro out. Maybe, Lance will feel bad and decide to stop dragging this out.

“Why are you giving me the Hanahaki conspiracy theory lecture, Lance?” Giving Lance this pathetic voice, Shiro want to go run around outside in his flip-flops and pajama bottoms. Even if it’s part of the act, sounding so run-down makes Shiro burn with the need to prove that he’s stronger than this and that everything’s completely fine. “All I wanna do is come inside and see my brother.”

“I’m trying to think like the evil super-scientists who might’ve screwed around with your head and made you turn on everyone who loves you, man!” Adjusting himself along the frame, Lance lets the door start closing. When it thumps into his shoulder, he sneezes—but in short order, he’s right back to smirking at Shiro like he’s already won whatever Lance thinks this is. “You’ll thank me for this when I’m right and we find a whole secret facility, full of clone Shiros who’ve been brainwashed, and starved to keep them from getting fat like you used to be—but, like, the scientists keep them buffed up with their comic book magic steroids—”

“Magic. Is not. _Real_. Lance.”

“Magic. Completely. Could be. Real. Shiro. Neither. Of us. Knows. For sure. We. Have. Freaking. _Hanahaki_—”

“_Please_, just let me come in and see Ryou. Or tell me why he doesn’t want to deal with me right now—”

“Oh, he’s probably fine with seeing you, I mean? When is he _not_? I’ve got three siblings and we’re nowhere near as close as you two—”

“Then, will you _please_ let me see him—”

“I’m just trying to point out that there are _alternative perspectives_ out there.” Lance tries to pout with gravitas and ends up doing neither of those things successfully. “And that _maybe_ you’re overly simplifying things in ways that might not be _healthy_ for you. Maybe I’m reaching with the exact specifics, but _not_ with the underlying concern. Or the points about you taking care of and paying more attention to yourself.”

Which would almost sound believable, if Lance could control his face and throat. Snickering like he might be slightly high on decongestants—or, worse, as if he might be getting Up To Something—Lance gives Shiro one of his biggest, broadest, shit-eatingest smirk. It sets his entire face on fire with excitement and makes Shiro’s insides lurch. What wouldn’t he give for the chill in his chest to be the prelude to a round of Hanahaki coughing, not so tight and anxious that Shiro wishes he hadn’t left his Xanax at his own apartment.

God, Lance is Up To Something, and he’s leaning on the door in such a way that Shiro can’t push past without risk of hurting him.

“Also, my point is, as always? Okay, say it with me now… _hashtag_?”

Heaving an affected sigh, Lance pokes at Shiro’s collarbone. 

“Not…”

He pokes Shiro in the chest, right above his heart.

“_My_…”

Another poke, near the center of Shiro’s waspish waistline. Lance’s finger bounces on the upper section of Shiro’s abs, finding no room to sink into. His cheeks flare up with a blush while Lance arches his brows as if both of them know what he means. Shiro _doesn’t_, not that he expects Lance to care right now.

In anticipation of the next word, Shiro sighs. He shouldn’t slouch, but if Lance is going to be an asshole about this, then why bother with decent posture. Lance lets his hand drift down toward Shiro’s belly-button. He jabs like he’s going to poke. Shiro easily steps aside and forward, well out of the way. None of that, thanks. There’s no need for Lance to touch Shiro’s midsection. No need for him to touch anywhere on Shiro’s body, but especially not his middle—

Except something pinches. Cold shocks through Shiro’s chest, and God, he’s going to be sick.

Lance’s hand is underneath his shirt. Lance’s fingers are on his stomach. Lance has grabbed up flesh instead of muscle, and Shiro’s going to be _sick_.

Triumphant, Lance grins like the Cheshire Cat. “**_Shiro_**.”

“What does that even mean,” Shiro huffs. Face burning, he bats at Lance’s wrist. “You don’t have to _strain_ to get a hand around my fat-rolls anymore, so I magically stop being myself? I’m some brain-hacked disaster like Bucky Barnes because I’m not _huge_ or, like—”

Shiro cuts himself off with a squeak. Splaying his hand out, Lance rubs at Shiro’s stomach, skin on skin. Worse, he snorts when Shiro’s blush returns with a vengeance. Heat spills off his cheeks and down his neck, and Lance keeps smiling like he’s ever so pleased with himself. If Shiro doesn’t get sick, then he’s going to either die or punch something.

“Stop it.” He smacks the back of his hand at Lance’s wrist again, and wilts when Lance groans.

“Ugh, _fine_.” Lance rolls his eyes harder than he should be able to manage, when he’s allegedly so sick. “Only the real you would get abs like Ryan Reynolds and Chris Pratt, and then be _shy_ about them—”

“I put them up on Instagram this morning! How is that _shy_?”

“It’s shy when Lotor has to hold your hand, tell you that you look ripped enough, and click the ‘post’ button _for_ you.” Although he grumbles about it, Lance finally lets Shiro into the apartment. “Ryou’s in his and Allura’s working nook. Be quiet getting there, though. ‘Cause she’s sick and sleeping, and if you wake her up, I swear to God? I’ll gladly break my hand punching you in your stupid, sculpted Adonis abs.”

With his pulse throbbing behind his temple, Shiro nods. Swallowing all questions and any witty retorts he could make, he slips out of his sandals and rolls a crick out of his neck. Sure, he leaves himself with a heavy feeling in the pit of his chest, but maybe Ryou will help Shiro shake that off. Anyway, there’s no point in fighting back when Lance isn’t in the mood to listen.

* * *

Ryou and Allura’s study nook is supposed to be a bedroom, but they and Lance deemed that unnecessary, since they all sleep together. Bookshelves line several of the walls and more books lurk inside the walk-in closet. Two desks are set up in opposing corners of the room, one for each of the fledgling academics who work in here. Both are messy, albeit in different ways. Where Allura frames her laptop with books (some lying open, and others heaped together), stacks of papers and notebooks and journals, an oversized mug of pens, and no fewer than three hairbrushes (all their handles wrapped up in brightly colored hair-ties), Ryou prefers to surround himself with their dirty dishes and empty cups of instant noodles, the hotplate where they usually keep a pot of coffee, stacked up folders (color-coded, but Shiro doesn’t remember the system), a Build-A-Bear that Lance and Allura made for him (dressed up as Han Solo), a leaning tower of books that he thinks he might use, and a bright red Swingline stapler.

Aside from his brother, though, Shiro’s primary interest sits along the back wall, underneath the window. Flopping onto the plush black sofa, Shiro squirms around the faux-leather-covered cushions. Part of him still doesn’t believe that he can lie here without any of his excess flesh spilling over the edges, but thankfully, that part quiets down soon enough. As Shiro stares at the _Howl’s Moving Castle_ poster that Allura hung on the ceiling, he breathes a bit more easily.

The world is a mess, and snow’s still coming down. Aside from Keith and Lotor, pretty much all of Shiro’s friends have decided that he isn’t himself anymore and doesn’t have a right to be. As ever, he’s probably a massive disappointment to his parents and grandparents, especially to the Grandfather he was named for—but at least Shiro has Ryou. At least he still has his brother.

In short order, he also has a chubby, ginger cat jumping onto his stomach and meowing at him. While Shiro holds out his hand for her to sniff and buff her face against, Ryou supposes that Blue might have gained a little weight while Shiro and Lotor were out in California. After all, they were gone for eighteen months and Lance loses all semblance of willpower when Blue rubs up on his legs and tries to get a treat. But Blue was healthy at her last checkup, and overall, she seems pretty happy, whether she has a few extra pounds on her or not.

“Well, yeah, I guess it’s easier for her to have a positive sense of self. Isn’t that right, Precious?” It takes a bit of straining, but Shiro manages a half-baked smile as Blue lets him ruffle her ears. “You don’t have to worry about whether or not you can fit in your jeans. You don’t have to stare at pictures of buff cats with no visible body fat and wonder why you don’t have that kind of discipline. You don’t get stared and snickered at when you try to go to the kitty gym—”

“As though Lance would let her anywhere _near_ a kitty gym. She might stress herself too much—”

“You don’t have to deal with any of the neighbor cats calling you a disgusting, desperate, fat slut and saying you should kill yourself because who would miss you anyway.” Shiro’s smile fades, even as Blue sprawls out on his midsection, flashing him her tummy. Carding his fingers through her fur feels like an automatic process, but that steadies Shiro’s nerves in its own way. “Your boyfriend’s sister doesn’t accuse you of ruining her brother, and seducing him with your revolting, slutty blubber-rolls. She doesn’t tell you that you don’t really love him, you just want to make him as miserable, screwed up, and abnormal as you are, you enormous, ballooning, desperate, slutty, land-whale.”

Dimly, Shiro supposes that he should probably find his voice unnerving. At the very least, he ought to be perturbed by how calmly he can say thing like this. Ryou pointedly narrows his eyes, arching a brow like he needs to figure out if Shiro understands how crazy he sounds, going on in the way he is.

With a limp quirk of his shoulders, neither confirming nor denying anything, Shiro keeps rubbing Blue’s tummy, trying to smile as her purrs vibrate through his abs. He doesn’t succeed, but Blue doesn’t judge him for failing to smile. Considering that his tone falls midway between affectionate murmuring and flat, distant resignation, he can see why Ryou wants confirmation that he made it to his session with Ulaz before the snow started.

“He’s still trying to talk me into going to our ten-year reunion.” Gently, Shiro scratches the scruff of Blue’s neck. With a deeper purr, she leans her head back and nibbles at his fingers. “I’m still telling him that there isn’t enough money in the world for me to go back to Connecticut, go back to bad old Glazek High, and pretend that I’m happy to see literally anyone but Adam and Laura. But apparently, Ulaz thinks that I need closure—”

“You don’t agree with him?” When Shiro gives him a noncommittal noise, Ryou rolls his eyes. He gives Shiro the long-suffering expression of a man who thinks that Sisyphus got off easy, only needing to pointlessly push a boulder up a steep hill for the rest of eternity. “_Seriously_? You just baby-talked my cat about how Adam’s idiot sister and her friends tormented you—”

“Yeah, because I went to my session with Ulaz, and now all of that stupid high school garbage is on my mind—”

“But for absolutely no other reason, hmm? No reason that _might_ support the idea that you need to get closure?”

“Whether or not I need it? I don’t think I’d have fun rubbing our old classmates’ faces in the fact that I finally have abs. Too much pressure.” For all Blue keeps Shiro somewhat grounded, a not-insignificant part of him wonders if jumping in a lake wouldn’t make him feel better. If nothing else, freezing might distract him from his headache. “Anyway, with my luck? Either Melissa and her old clique would look at my abs and decide that they were secretly friends to me all along, or they’ll make me miserable for daring to get _hot_. As if that’s really… Y’know, _whatever_.”

Ryou hums pensively, giving Shiro a long, searching look that makes him feel like an ant trapped under a magnifying glass. “Personally? I’m looking forward to this. Lance doesn’t have a show that weekend, and if Allura’s up for it? I’m taking both of them with me—”

“What? Like you’re going to go, ‘Hey, look at me. I’m still a big guy and these are my gorgeous significant others’?”

“Pretty much. You know what they say about living well and the best revenge.”

“If it works for you, then do it. I guess I don’t see the point in reopening those wounds.”

“Honestly? It sounds like you never let them heal in the first place.” Swiveling his chair around to face Shiro more properly, Ryou sighs. He clasps his hands together, sticking his index fingers out so he can point them in his brother’s direction. “Kashi-_niichan_, you have the chance to show up at the reunion looking hotter and thinner than everyone expects of you, thereby showing your bullies how wrong they were. Granted, I dislike the underlying logic of this idea—”

“I was gonna say…” Idly, Shiro blows at his white fringe. When it lilts over his eye again, he wrinkles his nose. “I mean, I understand you endorsing my pursuit some hypothetical revenge. But in this scenario, it’d basically be predicated on the idea that Melissa and her friends were wrong about how I’d never be thin enough to count as a real person.”

Another blow gets the white fringe off of Shiro’s eye, but not by much. At least Blue’s still letting him rub her tummy. “Everything about the idea involves sort of using thinness as a shorthand for happiness. Or a prerequisite for happiness. It’s about showing Melissa what’s what because I lost weight. Like somehow, going to the reunion with abs will magically prove that I wouldn’t let myself be kept down by the years of constant, targeted verbal abuse, which she ring-led because she hated me being friends with and eventually dating her brother. The entire underlying idea is that I’m theoretically spiting her not by loving myself, and loving my body as it was, and demanding to be shown basic human decency… but by forcing myself to fit her vision of happiness, as though I had no other reasons for doing what I did.”

He gives up on his hair, sighing and flipping his bangs back as much as he can while lying on his back. “Which, for one thing? Ignores all my other reasons for losing weight and acts like everything was about high school. But then, the rationale behind the so-called revenge is all about the _exact_ opposite of what you guys say you want for me, so…”

“We say so because _don’t_ want you doing that stuff to yourself. It may not seem self-destructive in the moment, but in the long-term view—”

“In the long-term view, we’re all dying anyway. Supposedly, there’s something romantic about doing it young so you leave behind a beautiful corpse—”

“I swear, if you don’t get to the _‘but’ _in the next five seconds, Kashi—”

“_But_,” Shiro bites out, letting his head loll to the side and arching both eyebrows at Ryou. “I’m personally over that particular romantic idea because it conveniently doesn’t consider the part where, beautiful corpse or not? You still end up dead—”

“Oh, thank God, I don’t have to fight you about that—”

“Believe it or not, I’m on the same side as the rest of you. About my ability to continue being alive _and_ about the flaws of treating weight loss as cure for unhappiness. Even if we ignore my list of reasons here, when you take in all of the available evidence? Obviously, thinness isn’t necessary for happiness. I mean, look at the two of us.”

Ryou wrinkles his nose, shakes his head. “I don’t follow.”

“You’ve got Lance and Allura.” Starting here is probably bad form—probably makes him sound like he’s sour, and bitter, and just upset about the fact that no one’s wanted to sleep with him since he slimmed down—but Shiro shrugs and lets himself keep going. Talking to Ryou means Shiro can word-vomit and free associate mostly free of judgment. “You love both of them, they love you and also each other. You’re working on your PhD in a field you love—and you’ve probably got at least a hundred pounds on me, at this point. None of which you seem interested in losing—”

“Not even a little. Because I am _healthy_, as is, and more than content with how things are going for me—”

“Yeah, which is exactly my point. You may not be the exact picture of _fat and happy_, since that usually goes hand-in-hand with painting somebody as _stupid_. But you’re fat and living your own vision of your best life, which…” Shiro blinks at the wall as if there’s a hidden picture somewhere in the paint, some kind of map so he can more easily navigate the rough waters of his own thoughts and feelings. “Me, on the other hand? I don’t even know where to _start_, except for how I am beyond exhausted with all this crap.”

Nodding slowly, Ryou sighs. He glances at the doorway with an expression like he’s Plotting Something, and the wheels on his chair drag on the hardwood floor as he turns back to his laptop. Whatever he closes up, he does it quickly and darts out of the study-nook, asking if Shiro’s thirsty and telling him to stay put for a moment. Blue lifts her head to stare off after one of Her People, but she settles back onto Shiro’s abs in short order. Sure, she squirms around as if she’s not sure what to make of the stomach that she’s lying on—but she goes right back to purring when Shiro brushes the backs of his fingers down her chubby side.

Ryou keeps his promise in short order, too. Dragging one of their beanbag chairs behind him, he shuts the door and comes to sit over by the sofa. He smiles until he proffers an old plastic cup with faded promotional art for Disney’s _Beauty and the Beast_ printed on it and a pink bendy straw sticking out. Then, Ryou’s face goes all dull, and glowering, and unimpressed—and it _must_ have something to do with whatever expression Shiro’s face is making without his permission.

“It’s ice water, Kashi. I did nothing special to it. If you haven’t been staying hydrated, I swear—”

“No, it’s not… Thank you for bringing that, okay? And the straw so I don’t have to sit up or anything—”

“You _are_ my brother. My _only_ brother. I’ve known you for our entire lives and then some, so I like to think I’ve learned my way around your _Moods_—”

“You _have_. You’re doing everything right, and the water is a good idea—I didn’t even _think_ I might need that, but you’re right? I probably do. Or anyway, it never hurts. And I’m sorry for crashing in while you’re working and being such a pain—”

“I did not say that you’re a pain. Or think it. Also, if I minded having you drop in, I would’ve told Lance to keep you busy with _Mario Kart_ or _Killbot Phantasm_. Or I would’ve asked him to tell you to go back to your own apartment.” Pushing his glasses up his nose, Ryou sets the cup on the floor, far enough away from his beanbag chair that he won’t accidentally knock it over. He heaves another sigh as he leans in closer to Shiro. “What happened and who do I need to kill.”

“Between you and Lotor, why is it always like…” Shiro can’t help scrunching up his face—but at least he keeps it together enough that he doesn’t whine. “If I answer that question honestly, you’re going to throw something at me.”

“True, I do reserve the right, as your brother, to throw things at you. However, I try not to do you any harm, and I save it for when you talk down about yourself as badly as you’ve done before. Or when you are doing things that are _obviously_ detrimental to your well-being.” Ryou arches an eyebrow as if asking Shiro whether or not he picks up on some tacit meaning in all of this (which he doesn’t). “Right now? You’re more at risk of me throwing something if you _don’t_ answer the question.”

Logic that feels so impeccable probably has something wrong with it. At the same time, though, Shiro doesn’t want to argue about it, not with Ryou. Getting through this conversation will probably be difficult enough on its own, now that Shiro’s dug himself this particular hole. When he tries to meet Ryou’s eyes, something lurches in the pit of his stomach as if it very much wants to make him physically ill. The skin crawls on the back of his neck, and the warmth and color drain out of his face as if there’s an invisible vampire feeding on him, and he can practically feel hives cropping up all over his arms and probably his abs—

“Well, first of all, I don’t want you to kill _anybody_.” Shiro drops his eyes to Ryou’s stomach. Hopefully, he managed that before he got too pale. “Mostly because I don’t want to have to fill out an application and schedule a visit at Bay State Correctional every time I need you to talk me off a ledge. I mean, talk about tedious.”

“As if any jury would convict me for protecting my brother. Or avenging him, as necessary.”

“Look, can we not even joke about this? It’s not funny.” Shiro wilts into the sofa, because Ryou’s probably giving him a look that’s curious instead of sympathetic, judgment-free but closer to pity than Shiro wants, and may or may not be realizing that his brother is even more of a mess than Ryou expected—possibly more of a mess than Ryou wants to be saddled with for the rest of their lives.

Or anyway, that’s what Shiro gets out of the way his stomach turns and the way that his head pounds like it means to kill him. Ryou might not be looking at him like that, but right now? Just in case Ryou _is_ coming to conclusions like those, Shiro doesn’t want to know.

“Sorry, I just…” Shaking his head as much as he can, Shiro sighs. “I don’t see the humor in the state of this country’s prisons? Or in the idea of my brother murdering most of our friends and going into one of said prisons because vigilante justice is generally frowned upon outside of comic books.”

“Then we won’t joke like that,” Ryou says as if it’s that simple and has been, all along. With a soft huff, he scoots his beanbag closer and drops a hand to Shiro’s head, brushes his palm and long, pudgy fingers over Shiro’s hair. “So, which of our friends did what thing, and why is it upsetting you?”

Shiro closes his eyes—partly to enjoy Ryou’s touch as much as possible (without feeling like it’s too much to process when there’s no reason that it should be), but mostly so he can think more clearly. Ryou’s asking a serious question, and he’s only asking because he wants to help. Spitting out any old answer would be tantamount to spitting in his face. Except it’d be doubly ungrateful, if not more so, because spitting in someone’s face generally isn’t premeditated. Not like giving someone who loves you a garbage answer to an important question.

When he’s done his mental inventory, Shiro pouts and quirks his shoulders. “At this point? There’s a shorter list of friends who _haven’t_ done anything.”

“I’ve got all afternoon, barring trips to make sure Lance and Allura don’t need anything.” When this earns him a low, soft whine of protest, Ryou gives Shiro a dull expression that’s trying very, very hard to seem indifferent. “Fine, Kashi. _Be _a stubborn idiot about explicitly naming names. If it makes you feel more comfortable, tell me who _hasn’t_ upset you, lately.”

“Keith and Lotor. I mean, Adam and Laura haven’t done anything either, but—”

“But Laura lives in Maine with her girlfriend, and Adam lives in… Where is he, these days?”

“Chicago. He thought he might be moving out to LA before Lotor and I left, but that job offer fell through.”

“How unfortunate for him. Regardless, they aren’t right here, right now, upsetting you in a more immediate, visceral fashion.”

“Seriously, the worst thing that either of them’s done lately? Is push me about how _they’re_ going to the ten-year reunion, and they _know_ that I have good reasons for not wanting to go? But they’re still going and they’d really like to see me.” Shiro leans his head toward Ryou’s fingers, taking the soft contact from someone who loves him and basking in it. “Also, they’ve both finally noticed how long it’s been since I put a picture of myself on Facebook, and they’ve started commenting on it at me, so… That’s probably a thing.”

“If by, ‘a thing,’ you mean that our old friends might be worried about you getting on another unhealthy, stupid crash diet that makes you miserable and has the opposite of its intended effect? Which, in turn, compounds and magnifies your self-inflicted misery and makes you feel like you’re trapped in an endless maze or whatever goth trash poetry you’ve been scribbling in your journals lately?” Ryou takes a deep breath, but ultimately decides he doesn’t want to sigh. “Then yes, I would be wondering the same thing, were I in their position.”

Which all sucks to hear, even if Shiro deserves that reaction. Through years upon years of doing exactly what Ryou described, Shiro has earned his friends’ distrust and given them every reason to be concerned about him when he’s acting oddly. Considering that a lack of selfies on social media has, historically, always gone hand-in-hand with Shiro treating himself like trash? He can’t blame Adam and Laura for worrying.

Still, he wishes that he’d never given them the reason.

“I meant to put something on Facebook sooner. Like, I would’ve done it _before_ Lotor put that one gym selfie up on Instagram? But I didn’t even want to do that, until he took my phone and posted it for me, and made it sound like a good idea…” He’s breathing fine, but Shiro feels like there’s something thick and cold stuck in his throat, right behind his Adam’s apple, trying to suffocate him. “Then, Adam didn’t exactly _flip_ when I told him I was going to the gym, last weekend? It felt like his texts got terse, though, and I hope that I’m projecting and he wasn’t implying what I thought?”

“What did you think he was implying? Maybe another pair of eyes would help?”

Handing over his phone, Shiro shrugs. “He asked how I’m feeling. Or doing, in a bigger sense. And he went on about how I don’t need to change myself for anyone, if I don’t want to. And I don’t know, it felt like he wanted to interrogate me about why I’m dragging my fat ass to the gym when, as far as he knows, it only makes me feel humiliated.” Blue meows in protest, but Shiro briefly takes a hand away so he can muss up his bangs. “My worst doubts? Said Adam wanted to give me the same old lecture about how my looks aren’t that important because I’m a beautiful person on the inside, where it _matters_ more?”

Shiro glances over Ryou’s shoulder while he’s scrolling through Shiro’s texts with Adam. Not that Shiro doesn’t _trust_ Lance and Allura, because he does. But part of this means that Shiro trusts them to act entirely like themselves. When they get concerned, they can get gossipy. He wants privacy, and he needs to check that Ryou’s datemates haven’t decided to pry. Content that they haven’t stuck their noses in, Shiro lets his head drop back onto the sofa.

He meets Ryou’s eyes by accident, taking his phone and wriggling until he’s comfortable.

“The texts could go either way, but…” Grumbling, Ryou ruffles his short, all-black mess of hair. Normally, he keeps it in better order, but given that classes got cancelled today, Shiro can’t blame his brother for skipping that. Whatever Ryou’s looking for, it doesn’t seem like he finds it before admitting, “My read says Adam was probably dancing around exactly what you think he was.”

Shiro groans, lifting his head so he can thump it on the cushion. It doesn’t hurt and the impact doesn’t make him feel more grounded. But the work of doing that feels… a little bit less bad, he guesses. Trying not to make any more noise, Shiro blinks at Allura’s poster, then thwacks his head on the sofa again when Howl and Sophie and Calcifer refuse to give him any answers. Down on his stomach, Blue mews at him as if she has several complaints she wishes to register with this. Shiro feels for her, he does—but God, he doesn’t even know what questions he’s silently asking. All he knows is how much he _needs _answers.

“What do you want me to say, Kashi?” Ryou starts petting his hair again, and it sure feels like he’s trying to keep Shiro from smacking his own skull around. But Ryou’s hand feels nice, so Shiro’s not complaining. “I understand why you’re upset, I do. But if I were in Adam’s spot, watching one of my oldest friends—the old friend who has my V-card, besides—engage in habits that, historically, have been nothing but bad for him? I’d want to ask if he was okay, too.”

“I _know_. I know I’m being ridiculous. And especially given how Melissa—”

“Tormented you daily because Adam liked you?” Ryou deadpans, arching both eyebrows like he’s daring Shiro to argue with him and/or prove him wrong. “Tortured you even _before_ you were her brother’s boyfriend? Then, found out that you two had sex and made it her personal mission to break the _fat, Asian slut_ who—”

“_Yes_,” Shiro hisses, hand stilling on Blue’s side. “That is _exactly_ why I understand him feeling protective—”

“Well, it’s why I think you should listen to Ulaz about going to the reunion and getting some just desserts on that little—”

“Have I been _myself_ lately?” Once he’s spit the question out and can’t take it back, Shiro stares up at Ryou and hopes that his face conveys how he cannot handle being lied to right now. He watches his brother for any signs of faltering and asks again, “Have I been acting like the brother you know? Or have I been acting… I dunno, _not _like myself?”

“You’ve been acting like an absurd perfectionist who’s more high-strung than he wants anyone to pick up on, worries about other people more than himself, and keeps most of his dramatic tendencies pent up inside himself until they burst out of him, usually in the form of tasteless jokes about the current state of his mental health.” Sighing, Ryou tucks Shiro’s long white fringe behind his ear. “Also, you’ve been acting so in love with Keith that it causes me physical pain. So, yes, Kashi-_niichan_. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve been acting like yourself. You just go to the gym and enjoy it, now. That doesn’t mean that you’ve stopped being _you_.”

Which could be enough, but Ryou hums pensively and adds, “The fact that you don’t think you’d get anything positive out of going to the reunion and delivering some humble pie to your former bullies? Another indication that you’re still my Kashi.”

“So, why doesn’t anyone else think so? Excluding Keith and Lotor, everyone’s acting like I’m…”

Shiro doesn’t mean to whine. The sound busts out of him like Keith’s belly out of a too-tight pair of jeans. God, he must sound impossibly petulant—and whether or not Ryou agrees, Shiro covers his face with both hands. Even _thinking_ about this garbage, Shiro’s head spins so much that he can’t believe it stays attached to him. His stomach reels and drops so hard, he wishes that he had an actual, physical reason to throw up. His face burns so hot that it’s a miracle nothing catches fire. Should he continue petting Blue? Of course he should. She doesn’t deserve to get ignored just because Shiro’s getting swept up in a torrent of nonsense things that shouldn’t even _matter_—

Something shifts on Shiro’s midsection and he whines. Something scratches at his chin and he feels echoes of it in his chest and stomach. Choking down a sigh, Shiro peels his hands off his eyes—and there’s Blue. Perching right there on his chest, licking him like she’s a dog. Since she’s decided that he needs grooming, Shiro tilts his head back to give her more access to his jaw and neck. While she goes to town on his face, he strokes a hand down her back.

“Are you feeling up to talking again,” Ryou needles, when it’s starting to feel like there’s nothing left for Blue to lap up. “Or do you require more kitty therapy? Because I’m amenable to either, but I don’t want you to forget that we _were_ talking about something.”

Shiro waves his free hand at Ryou—but that makes Blue jump off as if she disapproves of him acting like a brat.

As she hops into Ryou’s lap instead, Shiro sucks in a deep but ultimately unhelpful breath. “All I wanted to say? Was that everyone’s acting like I’m a completely different person since I got back.” Rubbing the bridge of his nose doesn’t settle him any better, either. “I get that I don’t look the same. I _get_ that I could’ve told you guys what I was doing, put pictures on social media, and eased people into things more. But the way people talk about this—”

“Okay, can you list more concrete examples, Kashi? Generalizing statements aren’t helpful—”

“Do you ever _listen_ when your boyfriend talks about me?”

“I absolutely do. But he has a lot to say about you, in a several contexts. So what, specifically, do you mean?”

Shiro rolls his eyes at the ceiling, but doesn’t find a decent counterargument. “Since I got back, Lance has been all kinds of, ‘Oh, Shiro’s in love with his stupid abs’ this. And, ‘Ugh, Shiro looks tiny, and deflated, and sick, and like he hasn’t eaten solid food in a month’ that.” As he takes another deep breath, Shiro tries to ignore the feeling like someone’s digging six-inch claws into his brain. “He goes on at me like, ‘If you’ve got it’—whatever the mysterious _it _is supposed to be, in Lance’s mind—‘then why, Shirito, aren’t you _flaunting_ it? How can you wear the same jeans and t-shirts that you’re comfortable in, not the showy little mesh numbers and skin-tight leather pants that I would wear if I had muscles? Only _you_ would get a set of abs to shame Ryan Reynolds and then not show them off in a sexy pin-up calendar.’”

Ryou huffs. “Better Ryan Reynolds than your eighteen-year obsession with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.”

“Yeah, I know. Blah blah, massively unhealthy. Blah blah, bad idea. Blah blah, ‘Not even Hugh Jackman thinks that looking like Hugh Jackman is worth the effort or the sacrifice, so shut up, Shiro, we aren’t letting you do that to yourself. Fuck your feelings and get over it.’” Rubbing at his temples doesn’t help Shiro feel better. If anything, it makes his head throb harder than before, reminding him that his headache hasn’t gone away and likely resents him for ignoring it.

Regardless, he closes his eyes and bites his lip until he makes himself tell Ryou, “Look, I love Lance like family and I’m glad that he makes you so happy. But ever since I got back, I’ve had to hear _your boyfriend_ tell everyone in a five-mile radius that I am _hashtag ‘Not His Shiro’_ anymore. He goes on about this at least ten times a week, and—”

“Questionable humor is one of Lance’s coping mechanisms, same as you,” Ryou says as though it’s taking considerable effort for him to pet his cat rather than punching a wall or bodily shaking Shiro in the hopes of driving home whatever point he thinks he’s making. “You cope with frustration, dire straits, and stress by making everything into a catastrophe, then reacting with a level of detachment that’s usually rather concerning. Lance pushes limits, makes inappropriate jokes, and plays the gadfly by way of processing sudden changes, things that he doesn’t understand, and perceived threats.”

“That’s what I thought at first, but? He’s had over a month to get used to how I look, so—”

“Whether or not he’s used to it doesn’t mean anything about whether or not he understands—”

“What_ doesn’t _he understand?” Shiro winces. Which is stupid, since he isn’t being loud. Grinding at the bridge of his nose doesn’t help any more than rubbing his temples. But it’s something to do with his hands, Shiro guesses. “Seriously, what part of this doesn’t make sense to Lance? Literally all that happened was that I didn’t want to be fat anymore. I wanted this for a multitude of reasons, most of them unrelated to how I wanted to look good naked and fit into _normal_-sized clothes for the first time since I was, what, _eight years old_? So, I lost weight in California. Lance isn’t stupid and this is not a difficult story to follow.”

“Yes, well. Lance does not have the same privileged access to the inner workings of your mind that I do. Not that you afforded that to _me_ about most of this, either, but…” Trailing off with great significance, Ryou sighs. “My guess? Lance is trying to reconnect with you through humor—”

“Why does he need to _re_connect with me?”

“Didn’t the both of you and Lotor say that Lance didn’t even recognize you at the airport?” Ryou meets Shiro’s drawling _so what?_ with a noncommittal-adjacent sound that wants so badly to seem casual, and falls ever so slightly short. “So, there’s a starting place to examine. Lance and I haven’t discussed this in any depth yet because his feelings on the matter have been, erm… _tempestuous_—”

“Which is, what? A polite way of saying that he’s trying to unseat me as The Gang’s resident gold star human disaster?”

“Regardless of the specifics? Generally, people tend to feel alienated, estranged, or similarly when a beloved friend seems to change themself so drastically. More so when said friend appears to do so entirely out of nowhere—which _is_ how it looks to everyone but Lotor, you realize. I mean, thanks to you shutting all of us out of the process—”

“Yeah. Because sharing the process _wouldn’t_ have resulted in at least you and Hunk and Keith hopping off a plane at LAX, taking an Uber to my and Lotor’s student apartment, and bodily dragging me out to dinner at the stupid Cheesecake Factory.”

Hearing himself go on like this, Shiro cringes at how petulant he sounds—but he cannot waver. Cannot show weakness or back down. Cannot give Ryou reason to think that he has any doubts or regrets. Brass tacks: it doesn’t matter if Shiro’s questioning anything he chose to do; it’s all over and done with now, and everyone has to live with consequences that were only supposed to apply to Shiro.

Cracking an eyelid, Shiro blows at a stray piece of his hair. “Because none of you would’ve called me to rub my face in how worried you were, if I’d posted on Facebook or Instagram about eating kale salad for lunch. And none of you would’ve seen me getting smaller in gym selfies, then come to whisper in my ear like, ‘Why even bother? You’re not going to lose as much weight as you want to, anyway. You never do. Shut up about your stupid diet, stop trying to do better for yourself, and go binge eat an entire Death By Chocolate sheet cake—’”

“Are you being intentionally dramatic? If not, then literally when has any of us ever suggested that you eat an entire sheet cake?”

“Of course I’m being dramatic, Ryou; I’m _upset_. I’m just…” Grinding the heel of his palm against his forehead, Shiro chokes down a sigh. “Don’t deny what I’m saying, okay? Because the fact is, if I’d posted progress updates while I was in California? We both know that all of you would’ve left me comment after comment after endless comments about how I didn’t need to do this to myself. Or why did I _need_ to be skinny, why couldn’t I be big and beautiful. Or how you loved me exactly as I was so who cares what sort of garbage I hear from coworkers, classmates, one of my profs, most of my now-former bosses, potential project-backers, guys in bars, guys on Grindr, every creep who has ‘no fats, no fems, no Asians’ on his dating site profiles but secretly wants to know what we’re like in bed, and all of the white twinks at Pride who decide that I must be straight because you’re only allowed to be fat _and _gay if you’re a bear, which clearly? I am not.”

“As ever? You are a lion who cares entirely too much about the opinions of the sheep—”

“If you and/or Lotor paraphrase Tywin Lannister at me one more time, I’m going to scream—”

“I’m just saying: small-minded people like that will latch onto anything to make you miserable. Letting them dictate how you feel about your size is like…” Ryou lets slip a string of wobbling, frustrated sounds like he’s trying to corral his thoughts into a more coherent form. “I know that it upsets you, Kashi-_niichan_. But those people don’t even matter, so I don’t understand _why_ you place so much stock in their opinions.”

“I know you don’t understand,” Shiro murmurs before he can stop himself. “But why can’t you try getting your head around the idea that my motivations were my own? Yes, I’m more sensitive than you are. No, I don’t like what people used to say about me or my body. But that doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of… y’know.” Shiro’s shoulders quirk and his head shakes. “Whatever.”

“Whether they were your own or not,” Ryou says after a long moment. “Your motivations mystify most of us, which is part of the problem. Possible theory: perhaps Lance is still trying to process everything he feels about because he has no earthly idea what your motivations were—”

“I’ve been upfront about them. Why isn’t good enough to say, ‘I didn’t want to be fat anymore, so I shut up and did something about it’?”

“You already know the answer to that question, Kashi-_niichan_—”

“Let me guess: blah blah blah, _why _did I hate being so fat in the first place?” Shiro chokes down a groan at Ryou’s confirmation. Grumbling, he shifts back to kneading his temples. “Be honest: would my hypothetical answer make a difference? Does anyone but you, Keith, and Lotor care what I have to say about why I did what I did? Or are they just waiting for the chance to tell me that what I want doesn’t matter unless it happens to line up with what The Gang wants for me.”

Ryou gives up a half-baked, pensive hum. “How’s your head?”

“Well, I’ve never had any complaints,” Shiro deadpans. “Wait until tomorrow and you can ask Keith for yourself.”

“I would prefer not to.” Ryou huffs, “Now, answer the question I actually asked.”

Shiro only opens his eyes so he can roll them. “I’ve had a weird headache all day. But I already took something for it—”

“And it didn’t work?”

“Not yet, it hasn’t. I don’t know what’s going on. I slept fine. I’ve stayed hydrated. I’ve eaten well, even though my appetite’s been pretty…” By way of explanation, Shiro blows a raspberry. When Ryou makes an uncomprehending sort of sound, he can feel part of himself withering. “It means that, all day, my appetite’s been even less real than comic book science-magic mind-control and supervillains who would’ve picked _me_ to be their own personal Winter Shiro. Which, by the way, is one of the latest conspiracy theories that your boyfriend likes for explaining what happened to _his_ Shiro. The _real_ Shiro. The one who must exist somewhere out there because I _can’t_ possibly be who I say I am.”

Leaning his head around, Shiro does his best to make eye-contact with his brother. “I can’t explain this any more than I can explain the headache. I’ve kept up with doing all my depression inventories for Ulaz. None of my other usual symptoms check out, so it’s not that. I haven’t even remotely overeaten; I’ve had to all but force myself to eat _enough_. I haven’t been sedentary; Keith had to hide my sneakers so I wouldn’t try to go for a run in the blizzard—”

“Good. There’s a fine line between venting nervous energy and being incredibly stupid—”

“_Anyway_. I don’t have a fever, or nausea, or any other symptoms of being sick…”

Except for the red azaleas that might still be in his lungs. Ten days clean doesn’t mean the flare-up’s gone yet—but they might be getting there soon, and ignoring it might make the Hanahaki leave him alone faster. It’s like the bullies from middle and high school. Sure, they went after Shiro and Ryou both, but given the choice between two fat, Japanese-American twins? Of course they picked the one who reacted more visibly. Giving the Hanahaki any undue attention will only make things worse.

“This whole thing is like my appetite up and wandered off to Narnia and didn’t leave a note—”

Out of nowhere, Blue cuts him off with a discontented meow. Down on the floor, she rolls out her spine and wiggles her backside, looking quite irritated indeed at having been put aside. Shiro feels for her, he does. Still, he’s not arguing when Ryou scoots closer and ruffles his hair.

“If I may, Kashi? You sound incredibly stressed.”

“Yeah, but honestly? Do I ever _not_ sound incredibly stressed?”

Gently, Ryou flicks the side of Shiro’s nose. “I mean more so than usual, genius. Which could very well impact your appetite.”

“I guess.” Letting himself sigh, Shiro nudges his forehead up at Ryou’s hand. “You’re plotting _something_. What is it.”

“I wouldn’t call it plotting. I’d call it asking you to stay for dinner.” Before Shiro can protest, Ryou holds up a hand, telling him to shut up and listen. “Whatever’s on your meal plan for tonight? I’m sure it’s great and that you’d cook it decently. But can it compare to shiitake udon, just like Ojiisan used to make?”

Now, _that_ makes Shiro’s mouth water. But as he swallows thickly, his brow furrows. “Where’d you even get his recipe?”

“Found it while I was looking for something else out in the storage unit.” Shrugging as if this is a perfectly normal explanation, Ryou says, “Look, I was going to make it for Allura and Lance tonight anyway because they’re sick. I’ve got enough that you could invite Hunk and Keith up, if you wanted. And most importantly?” Combing his fingers through Shiro’s white fringe, Ryou gives him a small, hopeful smile. “You know that Ojiisan’s shiitake udon is easier for you to eat when you feel like hot, putrescent garbage in the middle of an exceptionally humid August.”

“Evocative,” Shiro deadpans, trying not to smirk. “Is poetry like that supposed to make me feel like eating literally ever again?”

“No.” Ryou’s eyes light up knowingly. “I’m just trying to make you smile. And talk you into staying for dinner. Because you sound stressed, and because losing your appetite isn’t good, and because I’m feeling protective of my big brother—my _only _brother—who is a disaster, yes, but he’s _my_ disaster, so I need to look out for—”

“Okay, fine, you won me over. Jeez, you had me at, ‘shiitake udon just like Ojiisan used to make.’”

Shiro pulls himself up with a heavy sigh and fully intends to peel himself off the sofa.

Instead, he throws his arms around Ryou’s broad shoulders and tugs them into the tightest hug that he can manage. His deep breath comes in with more of a shudder than Shiro planned on. But it feels safe when Ryou hugs him back, when he feels one of Ryou’s hands rubbing gentle circles around his back.

Nuzzling at his brother’s shoulder, Shiro can’t fight back the wobbling, needy sound that claws its way out of his throat. “Thanks, Ryou.”

“Any time, Kashi.” Ryou squeezes like he’s ready to fight off anything that might come for Shiro. “You can always call on me.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stuffing/feeding, D/s play (with Shiro playing dom for a video that he and Keith are making, though Keith arguably plays), humiliation-play, feedist dirty-talk, and Shiro blowing Keith.

“Let’s go over today’s plan one more time.”

When Shiro gives him an incredulous look, arching both eyebrows like, _“Really, Baby? I mean, _**_really_**_,”_ all Keith does initially is shrug.

“Maybe last time went alright,” he says. “But for one thing? We went off-book in some pretty big ways and can’t ignore that. For another, you’re still new at this, and I stand by everything I’ve told you about safe-words and negotiation.”

At least Shiro doesn’t roll his eyes while rattling theirs off, both his and Keith’s.

Still, he could stand to be a hair less petulant in telling Keith, “I was under the impression that last time going alright? Meant that we could get a little bit less…” Whining softly, Shiro waves his hand, flicks his wrist in the widely-accepted gesture that means he can’t remember the word he wants.

After a few moments of failing to find it, Shiro sighs himself into a slouch. “Whatever. I thought we could get, y’know? More adventurous.”

“You dragged in humiliation-play that we didn’t negotiate, last time,” Keith points out, speaking flatly and hoping that he doesn’t veer too close to deadpan territory when he’s being serious. “Which worked out _fine_ because I liked it. But that wasn’t how things were supposed to go.”

Shiro huffs. “So, I’m watching myself more closely, this time—”

“Yes, but we’re still changing a few things up, this time. And if we stick to the plan? Then my dick is going in your mouth—”

“Like I’ve _never_ given a blow-job before—”

“Not on-screen, you haven’t. And I haven’t _gotten_ one on-screen, either. We’re doing something new for _both_ of us, which is kinda my _point_.”

This, finally, makes Shiro pause. Standing there shirtless and in a pair of gym shorts, he folds his arms over his chest. After the feedback that they got last time, Shiro insisted that he needs to let Keith’s subscribers see his abs—but Keith would be more enthused by this idea if Shiro didn’t look so ill-at-ease. When he catches Keith looking at his stomach, Shiro doesn’t tense up, exactly? But he curls around himself in a way that says he likely needs a hug but might not be in the mood to outright ask for one. Possibly not in the mood to be touched by anybody, not right now. Maybe not even Keith.

That thought makes guilt shiver down to the pit of Keith’s chest. God, if Shiro doesn’t feel well, then Keith should ask. Or reassure him somewhat. But the only impulse that’s coming in strong enough for Keith to feel it? Is the one yelling at him to reach for Shiro’s shoulder and completely hang the consequences. He can’t be certain if that would help or make things worse, but still, he wants to touch Shiro—

“I’m sorry,” Shiro mutters before Keith can say anything, after a few moments of trembling and looking pale. He makes himself look Keith in the eye, and Keith can see the strain all over Shiro’s neck. “I wasn’t trying to be flippant or anything. I know this is important.”

“Go over the plan for me, then. In your own words, tell me what we’re doing today.”

Shiro nods, then takes a breath that seems unnecessarily deep. “I made food for you. You’re gonna eat it. You’re gonna try to eat as much as you can. It’s even more of a stuffing clip than last time, so you’re going to complain a bit and push your limits. Either you safe-word out—but not with _‘mania’_—or I notice that you seem sick and stop you. While you’re eating, I give you belly-rubs like before. And I tease you, and I push you when you start lagging, and I suck your dick.”

Shiro looks at Keith expectantly—then rushes to add, “And your ‘too full’ safe-word is, ‘whale.’ And if I think you look sick, I just have to tell you. Because I’m not supposed to say that otherwise, because I’m going to encourage you, so that change of pace? It should be different enough.”

Keith tries to give him a smile and ends up with a playful smirk. “Good boy. What things are we allowed to improvise about?”

“Banter, because we’re ad libbing to begin with. _When_ I suck your dick, because the exact order of things can vary based on everything else about the scene. What order you want to eat things in, since… I mean?” Shrugging, Shiro looks like he’s pondering something more intensely than is really called for. If he doesn’t remember their rules, then Keith needs to call this off, but—“And I’m allowed to improvise about _some_ other kinky ideas. Not all of them, and not if they’re too hardcore. Like weighing or measuring, maybe. Hence the extra cameras set up in here.”

“Good boy,” Keith tells him again, glancing at the cameras. They likely won’t be needing these, but all the same, it’s good that Shiro’s on the same page, for once. “So… You feel ready to get going on this?”

Shiro sighs and taps his head against the wall. “As ready as I’m gonna get, I guess.”

* * *

_“Don’t Stop ‘Til I Get Enough.” You don’t get as big as Akira without having a healthy appetite! His eyes might be bigger than his stomach, this time—but at least he has Sable here to help him finish everything. Stuffing clip, featuring weighing, fat talk, belly rubs and belly play, and oral._

* * *

Today’s clip is even more straightforward than the one they tried to do last time: a stuffing clip with a weigh-in and Shiro blowing Keith. Sure, there’s room in here for improvising and there’s room for Keith to get more in-character—but they don’t need to worry about Shiro slipping into or out of his character that much. Maybe he hasn’t outright said so yet, but all Shiro needs to do is express his own interests and pay attention to his angles.

The setting is the only thing about today’s shoot that’s even remotely new or different, and that’s because Keith and Shiro have the freedom to play around a bit more. Between his respectable, normal job and apparently having plans with Lotor, Hunk’s gonna be out of the apartment until way later tonight. With that in mind, Keith had Shiro set up cameras out around the couch and in the bathroom instead. Not that they _couldn’t _do this shoot in Keith’s room. It’s comfortable in there and both of them know how to work their makeshift set pretty decently—but they have access to more options. Wasting them would be a shame.

Still, keeping things in Keith’s room would’ve been easier for them on one count. Namely: Shiro wouldn’t have needed to get quite so creative about setting up the camera behind Keith. As it stands, he jury-rigged a pretty neat solution: he dragged set his bedside table up behind the couch. He clipped the remote lens that he used last time onto his lamp and secured it with a swatch of duct tape. Watching the video feed on the camera’s main body, he adjusted the lamp’s position until he was satisfied, then had Keith hold it down while duct taping it into place.

Besides, it’s distinctly easier for Shiro to lay out a spread of food for Keith when they have the coffee-table at their disposal. There’s more space, no need to divvy things up between multiple tables, and the coffee-table has increased physical stability going for it. In addition to that, Keith can more easily eat whatever Shiro’s put together for him when it’s right in front of him. The tray-tables that they used last time aren’t that bad, and Keith didn’t mind making Shiro wait on him like they did when he first got home. Since they _can_ use a different locale, though, Keith won’t argue.

Flopping onto the sofa, Keith waits for Shiro to get everything out of the kitchen. Tries to focus on getting his mind cleared and ready, rather than on watching Shiro stretching out his back or watching him carry things out. Yes, he’s shirtless, showing off that warm tawny skin and all the work that he put into his body. Yes, he’s as beautiful with abs as he was when he was still fat. Yes, Keith can think of so many other things that they could do instead of working—but getting too lost in those ideas means that this clip won’t get made.

Not making the clip means that they need to post an apology for the delay. It means that they don’t get to rake in the extra payday that provides Keith’s excuse for why making amateur porn with Shiro _isn’t_ a terrible idea. It means that he might need to explain why he wants Shiro to feed him and touch him without the smokescreen that’s helping ease Shiro into admitting what Keith already knows, so Shiro can feel like he’s revealing it on his own terms. As though that weren’t enough incentive to be professional? Not making the clip means that Shiro will have worked hard on assembling whatever feast he came up with, and Keith might not get to eat it while it’s fresh.

_“Tragedy” _would be too melodramatic a description for that outcome—but it wouldn’t be _too_ far off from the truth.

So, Keith tries to keep his breathing steady. Tries to keep his mind aimed solely on the endgame here. They’re making a clip together, and it’s going to be great. Maybe Shiro will decide to open up already when they’re done today, or maybe this clip will simply help him with the process of deciding that it’s okay to let himself enjoy the things he does. However it shakes out, the only way that any of this happens is if Keith takes Shiro’s Grandfather’s old advice about patience yielding focus, and if he makes himself concentrate… Makes himself do this properly.

At the first course that Shiro escorts to the coffee-table, Keith can’t help but gasp. Dimly, he hopes his mic picked it up, because everyone who pays for this clip deserves to hear the reaction that Shiro’s efforts have gotten out of Keith before they’ve even properly started this.

Pizza was one of Keith’s requests for today’s shoot, because Shiro insists that he knows how to make them now. When Keith put the idea out there, though, he _definitely_ did not expect for Shiro to go in so hard. He carries out two of Hunk’s larger pizza pans—not the _biggest_ ones that Hunk somehow manages to fit into their cupboards, but not the ones that he uses for personal-sized or small-group pizzas, either—and each one gleams with enough sticky, gooey, perfectly-baked cheese that Keith has to sit on his hands, lest he get too excited and start before they’re fully in the scene. Sure, the cameras are rolling, but that doesn’t mean that Shiro’s _ready_—

He smirks, noticing the way Keith’s sitting, and Keith can’t decipher what the expression means. There’s a playful edge to it, which makes him _hope_ that it’s a good thing? But it also has the strain like Shiro had last time, the slight quivering here and there that says he’s trying too hard to get into Sable’s mindset, rather than freeing up his own desires.

That thought makes Keith want to sigh—but instead of letting him, Shiro cuts in to ask, “I take it you’re excited?”

“What all did you _put_ on those?” Keith squirms when this earns him pursed lips and a furrowed brow. “I mean, okay, I can see the pepperoni and the sausage? But… I don’t know what some of those are? Or I have ideas, but…” He pouts because Shiro’s turning this into part of the scene anyway. “Please, Sable? Tell me what it is?”

Shiro blinks at Keith, but before too long, he kneels and points at the pizza on Keith’s left. “I did this one with more meat than anything,” he explains. “There are some veggies, too? But it’s mostly… Y’know, I _know_ you love onions on your pizza? And I wanted to give you what you like… I’m doing this for _you_, right?”

Keith can’t tell how he should interpret that emphasis—much less the way that Shiro smiles like there’s something killing him from the inside out—but on the other hand? He’s not sure that Shiro knows what he means by any of this, either. Shiro might simply be letting himself get into the moment, which is exactly what they want. Getting him out of his own head means that his parts of the clip will look all the more convincing.

“A lot of the toppings are hidden underneath the cheese,” Shiro goes on, when Keith doesn’t have anything to add. “But you’ve got pepperoni and sausage, like you noticed. Then, some of that honey-glazed ham you’ve been liking. There’s chicken, but… Do you want to know what I did with it? Or do you want a surprise?”

“Surprise,” Keith’s mouth decides without any input from the rest of him. At least he doesn’t object to the idea, once his brain catches up.

Leaning toward the table, Keith arches his back so that his belly will pooch out further than usual. Even on empty—or relatively empty, anyway; Keith didn’t eat that much for breakfast, so it wouldn’t mess up the weigh-in—his stomach feels heavier than it did when Shiro got back home. Rounder is debatable. When he’s standing up, his tummy has less shape than that, sagging over the waistbands of pretty much every pair of bottoms in his wardrobe. While he’s sitting down, though, the bulge around his middle looks pretty spherical. Either way, as Keith idly brushes a hand up and down the curves he’s added, his flesh is soft and yielding beneath his fingers.

“You know what a _real_ surprise would be,” Shiro says offhandedly, cheeks flushing bright pink as he can’t look away from Keith’s midsection. Or maybe he won’t. Whatever the truth is, he gets a darker blush when Keith taps his tummy and makes it wobble. “Akira, I’m _serious_. How long’s it been since you got up on a scale? I bet checking your weight would be…”

Affecting another pout, Keith whines. “But what if the food gets cold? And I’m _hungry_, though…”

“That’s so much better. Don’t you wanna know how chubby you’ve been getting, lately?” Shiro waits for Keith to suppose he could stand to know that, then leans toward him. In a husky voice, he says, “The food will keep enough, Baby. We’ll be quick about it, promise.”

“I think _you’re_ more curious than me,” Keith purrs, drumming his fingers along one of the pudgiest places on his tummy. “Hmmm, Sable? I always see you watching me. While I eat, while I’m getting dressed… You _love_ this fat ass, don’t you? These thunder thighs and hips for days… This plump belly, all big like it’s getting—”

“God, you _know_ I love you, all of you, I mean—”

“You love to watch me _jiggle_… How much do you love it, though?”

Shiro swallows thickly. When he tries to breathe, it comes into him as a gasp and he has none of Sable in his warm, gentle smile. “You’re getting bigger all the time,” he says, barely above a whisper. “Anytime I get to touch you? Your chub’s so nice, so much, and it drives me _crazy_—”

“Finish telling me what you made for me first, Handsome.” Keith rolls his shoulders. It doesn’t do as much to move his belly as shaking his hips, but the flab on his stomach jiggles enough that it makes Shiro whimper—and Keith allows himself a playful smirk. “Maybe you wanna know more about how big I’m getting, Sable? But I wanna know more about how you’re gonna make me even bigger.”

Not that he blames Shiro for that curiosity, though. Keith hasn’t stepped on a scale since that afternoon when Shiro first got home, but he _must_ have put on more weight since then. The plain, red t-shirt he’s wearing _definitely_ fit him better a few weeks ago. It clung tightly to his flesh, but stayed more or less in place when Keith moved around too much. Now, when Keith wiggles his hips and makes his belly jiggle for Shiro (and the cameras, Keith supposes), the hemline creeps up on him. Not that far, but enough to leave a strip of pale skin exposed.

Besides, even if Keith _couldn’t_ feel the difference, you can’t eat the way he does, even outside of shooting clips, without it taking a toll. The thought of how much weight he might’ve gained—the thought of the numbers on the scale climbing ever higher and the thought that Shiro would find a bigger number on the tape-measure, if he wrapped it around Keith’s waist right now—all of it makes something hot and sticky and _longing_ flare up inside Keith’s chest. But for now, it’s nowhere near its full intensity. Keith quashes it easily by nodding at the second pizza and batting his eyelashes.

Trying to play it modestly, Shiro quirks his shoulders. “This second pizza’s a little bit more… I got more inventive with it?”

“How inventive are we talking, Babe? Like, does it belong on a Food Network special or—”

“I didn’t get, like? Overpriced hipster foodie place about it—”

“It still looks like you did more than most people could imagine for a pizza—”

“It isn’t that creative, honestly… I’m probably overselling it because I want you to like it—”

“As if there’s any pizza that I _wouldn’t_ like.” Maybe this doesn’t make his point as clearly as he wants to think—but Keith leans back and gives his belly a swift thwack. His chub jiggles, and he bites down on a contented sigh. Lets himself enjoy the way that Shiro blushes, instead. “You don’t get chubby like this without enjoying a good pizza, okay?”

“Well, maybe _you_ don’t? But someone else could conceivably—”

“What’d you do to the second pizza, Sable. I mean, if you’re seriously this nervous about telling me… Is there something wr—”

The way Shiro shakes his head makes Keith shut up. He expects a more immediate answer, with Shiro setting his jaw so firmly. Instead, it seems that Shiro needs a few deep breaths before he’s ready to spill the details on this pie.

Not that there _needs_ to be anything special about its contents—being made by Shiro makes it more than special enough, if anyone asks Keith—but there’s gotta be more to the second pizza than a homemade meat-lover’s dish.

“It’s less that I’m nervous, _exactly_,” Shiro supposes, pushing his white fringe back off his face. “But it’s pretty different? Because you told me to do whatever I wanted, so I did, but now I’m like… There’s nothing _wrong_ with what I did? But like I said, I want you to enjoy it.”

Keith should reassure Shiro that he’d like anything Shiro made for him. He should point out how many times he ever choked down easy-bake frozen egg rolls that Shiro overcooked or a grilled cheese that he managed to burn until you couldn’t clearly see the cheese, hating the taste but feeling so much warmer and fuzzier and happier because _Shiro_ had made the effort for him.

Instead, Shiro launches right into telling Keith what makes up this pizza.

For the most part, it looks like any other pizza that Keith’s ever eaten in his life. Maybe it has more mushrooms than he usually gets, but he likes them fine and Shiro wouldn’t put them in a meal if he didn’t have some kind of reason for it. As though the thick layer of mozzarella weren’t enough in the cheese department, Keith takes a deep whiff of the second pie and he can smell something else. Another cheese, lurking underneath the top level. He can’t tell what kind of cheese it is, not with the other scents mixed in there—the spices, the sauce, the other toppings—and not with the scent being so mild that Keith almost misses it. Whatever it is, the second cheese _can’t_ be a figment of Keith’s imagination. His nose is far too sensitive, there’s no way—

“You can’t really _see_ it right now,” Shiro cuts in, right on cue, as if he can tell what Keith is thinking. “But… I remembered you really liked those mini-ricotta bites that I made the other week? And okay, this will not taste the same because the ricotta isn’t fried? But it was on sale, and I have it on good authority that putting it under the mozzarella tastes _very_ good—”

“Where’d you even _get_ that idea?”

“Out in California. We were running low on mozzarella, nowhere near as much as we needed. But we _did_ have ricotta… We were having a party…” Shiro shrugs, and gives Keith a smile that’s milder than the ricotta’s smell. “So, I experimented?”

He doesn’t say it outright, but that answers the question of whose authority claims that ricotta on pizza tastes good. Good thing he keeps it to himself, though. They can’t drag Lotor into any clips, not even into the backstories of how “Akira” and “Sable” get from clip-to-clip or what brings them into any given scenario. They can’t mention Lotor like that without his consent. But Keith gets the point, and he trusts Lotor’s judgment well enough. Lotor has a decent appetite; it’s not his fault that, physically, he takes so much after his Mother and has never quite been able to keep weight on. Not that Keith _knows_ whether or not Lotor actually wants to gain, himself, but that’s probably so far off from the actual point that it’s not even funny.

Fortunately, Shiro keeps them on-task, keeps talking and keeps Keith from getting lost in his own thoughts: “I made the first ricotta pizza with a thin crust out there, instead of like this? But I know how much you don’t like thin crusts—”

“They’re never crispy enough for me,” Keith huffs. “Or anyway, there’s never enough crunch to make up for how they aren’t very filling.”

A ripple spasms across Shiro’s face, as if he has something to say on the pros or cons of thin crust pizza. Something more personal—knowing him, it’s probably a confession about _something_ that went on in California, or an as yet hypothetical newfound love for thin crusts—and with the way he digs his fingers into the table’s edge? Shiro seems like he’s fighting to keep these thoughts held back.

In the end, he gives Keith a lukewarm smile and tells him, “That’s why I didn’t make yours on a thin crust, Baby. I’d never do you wrong like that.” He watches Keith as if there’s a response that Keith’s supposed to give him—but when Keith comes up with nothing, Shiro adds, “Anyway, I had to change up the balance of the cheeses, too? There’s more mozzarella, so there had to be more ricotta or you’d never taste it… Get the texture, maybe? But you wouldn’t really be able to pick out the taste, or how it plays with the other toppings—”

“Always so considerate of my taste-buds,” Keith chuckles.

Shiro’s cheeks flare up in that pretty pink shade of his again. “I just? I know how much you like your cheese?”

Which is a cute enough line for Keith to let it stand without challenge.

It smacks of Shiro’s perpetual self-deprecation, though. There’s more to the pizza than its cheeses, just like there’s more to it than meets the eyes, and the amount of care and attention that Shiro put into picking out the toppings makes Keith’s heart flutter as if it’s been caught up in a tornado. The honey-glazed ham is visible, out on top and accompanied by the glimmer of Keith’s diced onions—not that he doesn’t expect Shiro to know his favorite pizza toppings, but… It still makes Keith want to throw pretenses to the wind and kiss Shiro so hard, he sucks the air clean out of Shiro’s lungs and sends both of them to the ER.

Maybe it’s a dramatic reaction. But some part of Keith has never gotten used to how much Shiro values him. That’s what Shiro spelled out all over this pizza, a testament not to how much he loves Keith’s body and his appetite, but to how much he cares about _Keith specifically_.

Even the unexpected toppings speak to Shiro’s personal investment, how much he wants to make Keith happy. Six fried eggs rest on top of everything and make Keith’s mouth slip back into watering, just when he thought he’d gotten it to dry out a little. When Shiro’s elbow knocks against the pan, the sunshine yellow yolks jiggle like they could spill out right now and drench everything in gooey, delicious goodness. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen, so Keith can make the most of them when he actually gets into eating. Which he’d start right now, except for one thing about the pizza that goes unexplained. Bright orange slices of fruit sit out there in the open, too, scattered among the mushrooms—

“Are those _peaches_,” he splutters, cutting off the guided tour of what Shiro put into this pizza.

When Shiro nods, Keith’s mouth falls open and his mind goes blank.

As if anticipating a litany of objections, Shiro holds up his hands in mock-surrender. “Look, I know it sounds like a really weird idea,” he says softly but not quietly. “And I know you don’t like pineapple or broccoli on your pizza—”

“Uh, yeah,” Keith drawls. “Because there isn’t a fair playing field between sweet and savory, with pineapple, it just tastes _bad_—”

“_Yes_, Baby, you’ve made your position very clear on that—”

“And the _only_ time when broccoli belongs on pizza? Is if somebody’s getting seriously anemic.”

By that, Keith specifically means Allura, who could make her own life so much easier—and, as a bonus, avoid enabling Shiro’s ridiculous belief that broccoli has any business being on a slice of pizza—if she’d simply eat more red meat. But much like Lotor, she hasn’t consented to being brought up by name while Keith and Shiro are technically in character. Either way, Shiro arches his eyebrow like he knows what Keith is getting at, and he doesn’t question anything.

“Duly noted,” he tells Keith flatly. “All of which is why I didn’t put any pineapple or broccoli on your pizza—”

“But you _did_ put _peaches_ on it—”

“It’s another thing that I tried out in California, okay?” The way that Shiro sighs sounds exactly like the way he’d sigh if they were really hanging around as themselves, talking about this as themselves, ribbing each other back and forth, going on about their kinks in the open way Keith _wants_ for them to have already. “I _know_ that it sounds weird. When I first got the recommendation? I didn’t think I’d like it either. But…” Slouching more than he’d usually allow, Shiro gives Keith a listless shrug. “The way it tastes is, like? It’s tangy? And when you mix it with the savory things like the ham and the sauce, you bring out more of the sweetness—”

“Oh my _God_,” Keith groans as his stomach twists up with desire. “Babe, that sounds _amazing_.”

“And then the ricotta helps to tie everything together?” Shiro looks so bashful as he ruffles his white fringe, then slips it back behind his ear. It’s a miracle that Keith doesn’t throw himself across the coffee table and kiss the beautiful genius-idiot to within an inch of his life. “And the eggs, I just put there because I know you like them? And apparently, people _do_ put eggs on pizzas, sometimes? Which I thought was kind of crazy, but…”

Shiro trails off without saying what he means. Without dropping any clues for Keith to guess very well, either.

At least they aren’t completely up Shit Creek, though. With a deep breath and a heavy sigh, Keith plies himself off the cushions. On his feet, he stretches out his back and shoulders—not because he has any knots to work out, but because it’s part of the show they’re putting on. The cameras are watching and Keith knows better than to skimp on letting his subscribers get a look at his body when that’s such a huge part of what they’re here for.

Or several good looks, as he usually does. Sucking in hard, he tugs his t-shirt down to meet the waistband of his boxers (one of the pairs that actually fits him right now, since they aren’t trying to pop any buttons, not today). Once the shirt’s in place, he exhales harder than he needs to, letting his belly surge back out. It doesn’t push the hem up as much as it could—but there’s a bit of skin exposed. The view from where Shiro’s sitting must be pretty good, if his rapt attention and his blushing are anything to go by.

“Are you coming, Babe,” Keith coos for him, heading toward the bathroom. “You wanted to see how much I weigh now, right?”

“But I thought…” Whatever Shiro meant to say, he trails off into a grumbling sigh. He scrambles off the floor but he’s light as the breeze as he dashes after Keith. Following Keith onto the cool tile floor—following him back into a camera’s line of sight and shutting the door behind them—Shiro points out, “But I didn’t tell you about the other stuff I made you yet?”

“Big deal. You gave me a treat, so…”

Keith shrugs. He glances at the door, but only for long enough to make sure he’s cheating to the remote lens that Shiro taped to it. Satisfied with his position, Keith leans against the counter, braces himself with his hands the sink. He scratches his back along the edge, trying to slouch _just so_ and make his belly pooch out and (hopefully) look slightly bigger than it is. Mirroring him (more or less), Shiro leans against the wall by the towel-rack. He folds his arms in the perfect way to push his pecs out without distracting _too_ much from his abs.

God, Keith’s mouth and throat go so dry from looking at Shiro… If he didn’t know any better, he’d never guess that he’d been struggling not to drool over Shiro’s cooking, merely moments ago. If he didn’t know that he’ll be salivating over the pizza again soon enough, Keith might think that he’ll never stop being thirsty.

Fuck, maybe he should’ve worn a tighter shirt, himself… It doesn’t seem right, Keith being relatively covered up while Shiro’s letting every muscle hang right out there… Keith’s just gonna need to push himself harder than usual with this stuffing. Maybe not as hard as he went last time—fine, he didn’t end up getting sick, but that was probably some kind of miracle, and Keith _did_ spend the rest of the day in bed—but hard enough. He’ll need to make his belly so round that this decently-fitting shirt can’t contain him anymore. That’ll make things square between how exposed he and Shiro are.

For now, though? Keith wiggles his hips as if begging Shiro to pin him against the wall and fuck him rotten. Not a bad idea in theory and nothing Keith would argue with, but not _exactly_ what they’re here to do. They’re here to make Keith’s belly jiggle—to give the camera on the door a good shot of both of them in profile—and to get Keith up on the scale. Which he should get a move on doing, or the pizza really _will_ get cold, exactly like he _doesn’t_ want to happen—

Instead, Keith leans toward Shiro. Even with relatively nothing in it, Keith’s belly hangs as he does this. He milks that opportunity, shaking his hips again and making his pudge wobble all over. Shiro’s tongue flits out across his lips and he can’t stop himself from gaping—_perfect_.

Keith moves quickly. Sinks his fingers past the waistbands of Shiro’s shorts and underwear. Drags him over by the fabric. He crashes into Keith with a soft, squeaking sound. Snaking one arm around Shiro’s waist, Keith angles them toward the camera on the door. He squishes up on Shiro’s abs, pressing himself as close to Shiro as he can get. God, Shiro’s body is so firm against his own. So _hard_ as Keith kneads his pudge on Shiro’s muscle, regardless of how soft and warm Shiro’s skin is beneath Keith’s hand. Tilting his head back, Keith leans up toward Shiro’s perfect, stupid mouth—but he doesn’t go all the way.

Yes, Shiro’s first response is blinking and blushing pink. But he gets the hint with Keith bucks on him, rubbing his hips on Shiro’s and jiggling his chub against Shiro’s taut, flat stomach. He cups his right hand on Keith’s full cheek and softened jawline. He hesitates, waiting for Keith to nod—and once he has that nonverbal permission? Shiro leans down and presses his mouth on Keith’s.

First contact—even making that floods Keith’s body with warmth. So small a touch from Shiro—so much less than what Keith’s wanted, and yet, so much more than he’s ever dreamed—and it feels like Keith has fireworks going off inside his chest. With the crackling sensation in his lungs, he’d be worried about Hanahaki—be terrified of hacking up goth trash black roses all over Shiro’s face or worse, getting them in Shiro’s mouth—except that Hanahaki preludes feel _cold_ for Keith. They feel impossibly heavy, and like he’s been caged up, and like everything is _freezing cold_ because the Hanahaki wants him to think that he’s alone. That he’s been right before, every time he’s felt like he had no one, not really, because he _couldn’t_ reach out, because honestly, wouldn’t all his friends be better off without him.

Yet, as he sighs into Shiro’s mouth—as he nibbles at Shiro’s lip and sucks on Shiro’s tongue—all Keith feels is light. Light, as in warm, like he’s just come in from a blizzard and gotten wrapped up in Shiro’s arms. Light, as in brightened up so much that he could see five miles in perfect darkness. Light, as in Keith doesn’t care how chubby he’s getting or how heavy he is; his heart sure wants him to think that he could take flight right now, if he would only tell the laws of physics where to stick themselves and give it a shot.

Light, as in he has waited so long to do this—he’s thought about Shiro’s mouth more times than he cares to count, going back to when Keith was eleven, if not earlier, and he’s put so much consideration into how kissing Shiro could go—and maybe this isn’t exactly what Keith’s imagined, not least since _Shiro_ was the fat one in most of his fantasies? But every single daydream, every single wet dream, every single idle reverie during a boring lecture when Keith spaced out to thoughts of Shiro’s mouth because he didn’t care what Dr. Bernstein had to say about symbolism in the sculptures at some Benedictine abbey in some French place that Keith has never heard of once outside of that specific class?

Everything Keith’s ever dreamed of evaporates in the heat—the undeniable, impossibly real, present right here and now, ultra-kind of_ heat_—that spills out in this moment. The scorch of their bodies pressed so close together, the blaze of Shiro’s abs pushing on Keith’s chub, the spark of Shiro whining when Keith grabs his firm, round ass and scratches at his hip, the burn of Shiro’s mouth on his. Fire erupts in Keith’s chest from kissing Shiro, and God, what he wouldn’t give to make it last forever.

Except it can’t do that. Nothing ever does. Aside from the part where they need to breathe, this clip wasn’t _meant_ to include any extensive comparisons of their bodies, any explorations of the differences in their size. Shiro doesn’t pull back _too _far as he tries to catch his breath—Hell, he stays close enough for Keith brush his hand up and down one of Shiro’s sides without needing to stretch his arm—but he shifts back far enough for Keith to see it. Something gnarled-looking and an angry, raging shade of pink, right down by Shiro’s waistband.

Furrowing his brow, Keith peels the fabric back like peeking at a Christmas present. With a gasp, he lets it snap back into place.

This makes Shiro whine—but he still looks at Keith as if he hung the moon and stars. As if the entire universe begins and ends with Keith. He brushes Keith’s bangs off his face and cups a hand around his jawline. “Baby?” he says gently, watching Keith with so much concern that he literally cannot look Shiro in the eye. “You okay—”

“You have a scar,” Keith tells him, thickly. Shiro’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows thickly, but Keith still can’t meet his gaze. His skin is crawling enough already, his head swamping itself up in thoughts of where that scar is and what it could mean—“Also? Yellow. And what the Hell is this supposed to be?”

“It’s a _scar_,” Shiro sighs. “It isn’t _supposed_ to be anything—”

“You _know_ what I mean, smart-ass!” As soon as he snaps that out, Keith cringes. Slumps back harder on the counter, but makes himself look Shiro in the eye. “Sorry, I’m not… I’m thinking a lot of things right now? And I’m trying to withhold judgment? But if you don’t take this seriously and tell me what that scar is from, I’m _going_ to assume the worst, okay.”

“What’s the worst going to be?”

“I don’t know, but neither of us is gonna like it.” As if this will reinforce his next point—or at least keep Shiro from reading too much into things in the wrong ways—Keith bats his ankle at Shiro’s calf. “I’m not angry. Not yet, anyway. I can’t promise that I’ll _stay_ not-angry—”

“Surgical scar, okay?” With that admission, Shiro slumps like someone’s cut his strings. “I meant to tell you, I should’ve told you, I _know_ I should have? But then I told Hunk and now he’s been mad at me for _weeks_? I kept telling myself to let you know, no matter how much I hate the scar, or how much I’d hate telling you, I just…”

That sigh belongs to someone who’s shouldering way too much. But Shiro doesn’t jerk away when Keith reaches for his arm. Meeting Keith’s eyes, he pales. His lips and hands tremble as he drags himself through saying, “I’m sorry. For not telling you. When it happened, everything was a stressful mess and I didn’t expect, but it _did_ happen, and I lost track… But I should’ve told you since I’ve been back.”

Keith considers that before he curls his hand around Shiro’s. “Can you tell me what happened?” When Shiro nods without saying anything, Keith doesn’t let himself roll his eyes. “Can you tell me about it _now_?”

“Oh my god, it was so gross—”

“I’ve shot clips and done chat sessions while on the verge of puking—”

“I got a rash. It got infected. It was _disgusting_, and needed surgery—”

“Like that’s something you can’t _tell_ me?” Keith balks. Tightens his grip on Shiro’s hand. “Like I wouldn’t _understand_—”

“Maybe if it wasn’t _technically_, like…” Shiro sighs and averts his eyes, looking like he could be sick. “I was ashamed of it, okay?”

This both does and doesn’t answer Keith’s questions. Any of them. Some of the explanation is clicking into place for him, despite everything that Shiro isn’t saying—but there’s still a lot that Keith doesn’t get. So much that doesn’t make sense about the situation. So much that he’ll want to ask Shiro later, when they aren’t staring at a decision about pushing through this shoot or not. It isn’t a commissioned piece, they could drop it if they wanted—

“Do you want to…” Keith sighs. Tugging Shiro closer, he snakes his arms around his waist. “We can stop, if you want.”

Shiro shakes his head. “I’m good to go if you are.”

Keith says nothing. Arching his eyebrow makes Shiro slouch enough. Makes him pause and put actual thought into that answer.

His smile wobbles, but he insists, “I’m good to go if you are. _And_ if I can hold off explaining the rest until we’re done?”

“Fair enough,” Keith supposes by way of agreeing to those terms. “Green?”

“Like the broccoli you won’t let me put on pizza.”

“Because broccoli does not _belong_ on pizza,” Keith drawls, rubbing his chub up on Shiro’s abs again. It’s not the most obvious way of saying that they’re back in the game, though. So Keith cops a feel of Shiro’s ass again. Brushing his hands up Shiro’s sides, staring at the bridge of Shiro’s nose because it’s close enough for jazz to pass for eye contact, he says, “_Listen_ when I tell you things like that, Sable.”

Bowing his head, Shiro hums. “I listen to you _fine_, Baby.” He crowds in on Keith, squishing on Keith’s stomach. “We have different _tastes_, I think?” As Keith drapes his arms around his shoulders, Shiro nudges their foreheads together. He kisses the tip of Keith’s nose. “Of course we do, though. ‘cause I don’t have a sweet tooth quite like yours. Plus, I eat my vegetables and I work out?” He sighs contentedly, caressing Keith’s tummy. “But you won’t even touch a carrot stick without completely _drowning_ it in full-fat ranch dressing.”

Desirously, Keith groans. Maybe from that idea. But probably more from Shiro pinching up his love-handles.

Before Keith can get too accustomed to that sweet, sweet contact, though, Shiro edges back.

But before Keith can get too much in his head, fretting over what this means or doesn’t, Shiro flashes a grin worthy of the Big Bad Wolf. With a breath of extra space between them, he cups a hand around the side of Keith’s belly. He leaves it there, leaves Keith’s tummy unperturbed—so, Keith pushes back into Shiro’s palm, into that warm, solid touch. Leaning down, Shiro lips at Keith’s forehead, as if he can’t tell that Keith’s. Then, he brushes his lips along Keith’s cheek. Then, he lingers by Keith’s mouth. God, they’re _so close_ to each other and it feels _so right_. This is _real_, and Shiro’s with Keith, holding Keith and sinking his hands into Keith’s chub. He’s _right here_, right up by Keith’s mouth, making Keith’s lungs twist up and refuse to let him breathe…

Except he doesn’t give it up and kiss Keith. Even when Keith whines for him, Shiro only teases like he _might_ decide to go there and make out with Keith again. Keith’s steeling himself, ready to claim Shiro’s mouth and kiss that idiot himself—

Instead, Keith ends up squeaking. Not like he _meant_ to do that. But when Shiro pats his belly with more force than he needs? Keith can’t quite help it, just like he can’t help the way that Shiro jostles his pudge. Right as Keith’s chub calms down, stops wobbling like a drunk chick at a party—right as he thinks he’s got this and goes in for Shiro’s mouth again—he gets another swift knock on the side of his belly. Not quite smacking, but enough to set Keith’s pudge jiggling harder than anything else has today—which must have been Shiro’s idea all along.

“Can’t argue with the results of all your pigging out, though,” he says, chuckling against Keith’s mouth.

Which makes Keith’s insides knot up with unfulfilled longing—and okay, fuck this. That’s more than enough teasing, thanks much.

When Shiro shuffles like he might pull back, Keith tugs him down and steals a kiss. He lunges at Shiro, moans into the warmth of his mouth, bites on his lips with a mind to leave behind a warning to anyone else that Keith has the exclusive kissing rights here even though he doesn’t. Not yet, anyway. Regardless, Keith sucks on Shiro’s tongue with vampiric intensity, tilts his head so that Shiro can get a better angle to lean in—and the best part? Shiro yields.

Letting slip a sigh, Shiro gives Keith what he wants. He kisses back gently, slow and sweet in the face of Keith coming at him like a hurricane. Shiro caresses Keith with his mouth, like he’s trying to remind Keith that he’s beautiful and special and no one else can ever be exactly like him; in response, Keith squalls, groaning with _needfuckwant_, and jerks Shiro closer, and cackles into Shiro’s mouth at the way this makes him whimper. Keith bites on Shiro’s plump lower lip, sucks as if he’s trying to leave behind a bruise, and writhes in Shiro’s arms, bucking up at his hips so hard and fast, Keith makes his chub bounce and sends ripples through his tummy; all Shiro does is sigh and nudge Keith back into the counter, crowding in on him like a tight hug or a weighted blanket, like he thinks there’s something wrong or some reason that Keith needs protection from literally anything.

Whining, Keith tightens his embrace, so he can’t get any stupid ideas about Keith not really wanting this. So he can’t possibly find a way to think Keith hasn’t wanted this—that Keith hasn’t wanted _Shiro, himself_—for so long that trying to put a number on it makes his heart ache and scream like he’s getting stabbed. More importantly, Keith clamps down so Shiro can wriggle, can put a stop to this if that’s what he _wants_—but he can’t try to run screaming for his bedroom and his denial that defies all logical explanations Keith’s ever come up with.

Because the cameras don’t matter nearly as much as making this kiss as real for Shiro as it is for Keith. If Shiro gets any note from how close Keith holds him—from the way Keith throws himself headlong into this kiss—then please, Jesus, let it be the note about how much Keith _wants_ him. If not that, then let him understand that Keith isn’t going _anywhere_, never wants to leave him. Or maybe he could do both of them a favor get his head around _both_ ideas—

Or Shiro could slip his hand between them and grab up a sizable roll of belly-fat. Keith whines into his mouth for that. He squirms as if this will make Shiro get rougher. Pressing himself into Shiro’s hand makes Shiro go there, though. Gets him to squeeze Keith so tightly that it hurts—and _fuck_, that pain goes straight to Keith’s dick, makes him whine like he can never possibly get enough of Shiro touching him like this, which conveniently has the benefit of being _true_—and as he shakes that pudge, Keith kneads at a tense spot on Shiro’s upper back.

God, he’s always so fucking tense. Maybe it gets a sweet little moan out of Shiro, now. But for the last kiss he plans to give before they get a move on, Keith goes in softer. Lighter. Like the healing balm for the fire that he’s been throwing Shiro’s way in the hopes that maybe—_maybe_, if they’re lucky—Shiro will let himself relax about this. If not about performing for an eventual audience, then about being with Keith, getting his hands all over Keith’s body and getting his fingers lost in the plush mounds and dimpled valleys of Keith’s chub, letting Keith touch him in return and rubbing up on Keith so that Keith can _feel_ how soft he’s gotten, how pliant and blubbery he is beneath the hard plane of Shiro’s abs.

Separating from Shiro sounds like the worst idea that has ever been had by anybody—but when Shiro whines about it, Keith breaks out a throaty voice. Tells him, “I can’t get on the scale _with_ you, Babe…” Licking his own teeth, Keith glances up at Shiro and hopes it looks like he has bedroom-eyes. “Don’t make me _work_ on hauling you around…”

Shiro nods. Keith smiles. He waits for Shiro to back up—but Shiro pushes Keith back against the counter. A gasp comes out of Keith before he can stop it. While Shiro’s hands ghost down his pudgy sides, his full hips, and his flabby thighs, Keith furrows his brow at the wall. Like there’s a secret codex hidden in the paint or in the towel rack or _something_. Like anything can explain what Shiro thinks he’s doing, bending over partway and feeling up the backs of Keith’s legs without actually groping him or taking time to appreciate his chub, the way that Keith _deserves_.

Then, Shiro hesitates. He rubs at one spot and digs in his grip. The gears spin in Keith’s head without finding any possible explanation. None of this comes together coherently. Not until, with a barely audible grunt, Shiro lifts him off the floor.

A tight, startled noise leaps out of Keith. He tightens his hold on Shiro’s shoulders. Buries his face in the curve of Shiro’s neck. His legs coil around Shiro’s trim waist without waiting for Keith to tell them so. Good thing that Shiro stands still, once Keith’s up, because first of all, Keith needs to make his lungs calm down. Needs to make sure he’s breathing right and that his nerves are steady and that he fights off the thoughts of how ridiculous he has to sound, getting startled by Shiro hoisting him up.

For another thing, Keith needs to drag himself out of Shiro’s neck. While his cheeks flush warm, Keith blinks at Shiro’s even, singularly unbothered smile. His face heats up like there’s a furnace burning underneath his skin—no doubt, Keith’s going an impressive shade of red—and Shiro tries his best to keep looking like he’s so above it all. There’s a glimmer in his soft, gray eyes, though. One that can’t help but make Keith think—

“God, Sable, is _this_ why you got serious about working out,” he deadpans, despite feeling like his heart could burst out of his chest and make this clip go in several gorier directions. “You didn’t care about health and fitness at _all_, did you? You just wanted to sweep unsuspecting fat boys off their feet.”

Without saying anything, Shiro quirks his shoulders and keeps a tight hold on Keith. To most people, his smile would look perfectly angelic—but Keith can pick up on that subtle, razor-thin edge that Shiro’s getting. He can perfectly pick out the gleam like right about now, Shiro’s feeling _ever-so-pleased_ with himself.

Keith faux-groans, plays as if he’s actually exasperated. “You could’ve just _told me_ that, y’know.” So it’s clear to Shiro that Keith isn’t really upset—and so viewers can’t watch this later and think that Akira doesn’t enjoy this turn of events—Keith nudges his forehead at Shiro’s. Pecking at Shiro’s cheek, he ducks his growing double-chin in the hopes of making it look bigger than it really is. “Not like I would’ve _judged_.”

Shuffling around the counter—over to the scale and the remote lenses that he set up to get shots of the read-out and Keith’s belly while he’s weighing in—Shiro supposes that he could have done that. “Except that I _did_ care about the health and fitness parts, Baby. Exactly like I’ve been telling you.”

He says it with hardly any tone—which, in and of itself, makes Keith frown. If it were an actual, conscious character choice on Shiro’s part, then that would be one thing. But when Keith cups a hand around his cheek, Shiro melts into that touch. He adjusts his hands, keeping a tight hold on Keith so he won’t slip anywhere or fall—after all, Shiro’s doing most of the work to keep Keith up—but the smile that he gives Keith looks so faded and so _tired_.

Not tired like he just needs a nap, either. Tired like it’s genuinely getting to him, the way that their friends keep talking about his weight loss, his body, and his motivations. After nearly a month, they’re getting used to Shiro no longer being as fat as he was before. Still, aside from Ryou and Lotor easing up, and Hunk going stone-silent whenever anybody brings the issue up, all the little comments that The Gang makes about Shiro’s appearance haven’t stopped. They’ve simply been woven into the fabric of How Everybody Does Things, Now.

Brushing his thumb down the apple of Shiro’s cheek, Keith sighs. Guilt kicks around his rib-cage like it’s having a fucking temper tantrum, and he nudges his forehead into Shiro’s, but it doesn’t feel like that’s good enough. Giving him a soft, breathy kiss doesn’t feel like it’s enough consolation for Shiro, either—but at least he whimpers so sweetly into Keith’s mouth. At least he gives up a noise that sounds like maybe Keith is helping, even if it’s not by much.

When Shiro pulls back to catch his breath, Keith nuzzles at him. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I believe you—”

“I know _you_ do, Baby.” Shiro keeps his voice so low, Keith wonders if the microphones will pick it up. Dimly, he hopes they do. Shiro’s probably gonna cut this from the final edit anyway—but he deserves to save it for himself, in case he needs to hear a reminder when Keith’s not around to give it to him. Kneading at Keith’s thigh, he says, “Sorry, God, I’m being distracting—distract_ed_—I just…” He leans into Keith and their foreheads bump again. “It means a lot that you believe me, but with everything else—”

“_Fuck _everybody else,” Keith bites out and looks Shiro in the eye, so there can be no mistakes about how serious he is. “I don’t _care_ what everybody else thinks about you. They’re wrong. I _know_ they’re wrong. And I know _you_, which just makes them even _more_ wrong. And if they wanna fight about how wrong they are, then they can put up or shut up. Because I _will_ fight them for you. Because you are happy and they are _wrong_. Period.”

Blinking at Keith borderline uncomprehendingly, Shiro lets his mouth hang open for so long, Keith starts digging for something else that he can say. Fuck, that was supposed to be a _good_ line. He was supposed to give Shiro a beautiful, rousing, motivating speech that helped him throw off his concern for what everybody else thinks about his body or his diet or his gym routine or anything. Keith was _supposed _to have the magic words that helped Shiro just do what makes him happy. Except he’s nowhere near as good at motivating speeches as Shiro is, and what if he just fucked up _everything_—

“Well, I mean,” Shiro starts, cutting in before Keith can let himself get too worked up. Pursing his lips, Shiro goes slightly pink. He gives Keith a shrug and a sheepish smile as he admits, “You weren’t wrong, uh? About what you said before? About me, y’know… Wanting to sweep you off your feet? ’cause you _deserve_ that—”

Playfully thwapping Shiro’s bicep, Keith groans. “God, put me _down_, you fucking _nerd_. Before I put my tongue in your mouth again.”

“As if I’d really _mind_ that?”

Despite smirking playfully—and despite having an admittedly good point—Shiro sets Keith down. Good move.

Except for the way he puts Keith directly on the scale. Creaking beneath him, it’s cool on Keith’s bare feet, a stark contrast to the warmth of Shiro crowding in on his front. Keith rolls his eyes, since Shiro’s preoccupied with looking over his shoulder anyway. This isn’t how he thought they were going to do things. Not that he can argue with having Shiro close to him like this, or with having a free shot to cop a feel of Shiro’s ass—but Keith has to arch his back differently, than he planned, letting the camera get a good shot of his ass. When he wiggles up on Shiro, Keith can’t _totally_ enjoy the way his chub jiggles on Shiro’s abs or Shiro’s hand delicately pinching a roll of belly-fat.

Worst of all, though: Keith can’t see the scale for himself. He _knows_ that he must’ve put on weight. He can count off the ticks as the scale thinks about its final read-out. And when Shiro’s hand shifts out of groping, back to idly caressing, Keith can guess that there’s something _good_ and he’s missing out on it.

But all he has to go with is Shiro stammering until he spits out, “Uh, how much did you weigh when I first got home, Baby?”

“Two-oh-three. And a half.” Grimacing at the wall so he doesn’t sit on this exasperation, Keith swats Shiro’s ass. It bounces so pretty, and he makes such a nice _“eep!” _sound, then whines for more when Keith gropes him again. Keith snickers, “D’you expect me to believe you don’t remember that?”

“Well no, I mean, it’s just kinda like, you’re really, with what it says, I didn’t expect—”

“_Move_.” Rather than let Shiro hesitate, Keith edges both of them back.

He turns to face the scale and climbs on before Shiro can get handsy when they have a job to do. Waiting on the final verdict, Keith breathes down lower, like Allura taught him, pooches his belly and jiggles it for the camera. When the scale’s ready, the bright red digital numbers glare back at Keith: _218.5._

“…Oh,” he says, a bit thickly.

Not that he can blame himself for being thick. Shiro’s only been back for a month and Keith’s gained another fifteen pounds.

As he combs his fingers through his bangs, Shiro’s hands drop to his hips. Keith leans into Shiro’s chest—he sighs contentedly as Shiro cups both of those warm, solid hands around the sides of his belly, pushing Keith’s pudge out even further as he sinks his fingers into all the softness—then, a spark. His higher brain snaps awake. Curling his hands around Shiro’s wrists, Keith jerks them forward again. Shit, he can’t let Shiro feel him up so nicely without being sure that the camera will catch it.

Thank God, Shiro rolls with it. Stays pressed close against Keith’s back and keeps his hands right in place. Chuckling softly, he kisses Keith’s shoulder. Ignores the cotton of Keith’s shirt and nuzzles at the ever-so-slight pudge that Keith didn’t have when Shiro left. Most of the time, his clothes hide it well. If nothing else, Keith’s belly and hips and thighs all draw the most attention, so no one much notices how much softer Keith’s gotten in the shoulders. Leave it to Shiro: he can’t interpret a signal of romantic interest to save his life, but somehow, he _knows _which parts of Keith’s body have gone so unfortunately ignored.

He keeps feeling up Keith’s stomach too, though. His hands rove across every outward curve. His fingers sink into every place where Keith’s gotten plump and plush. While Shiro’s trailing feather-light kisses along Keith’s neck, both of his hands edge underneath the hem of Keith’s shirt and squish into a sizable roll of belly-pudge. Keith’s breath hitches in his throat, but Shiro doesn’t ease up until he makes Keith whine.

“That’s fifteen pounds you’re up since I’ve been back.” Voice low and throaty, he lips at Keith’s neck. He pushes Keith’s chub out further, like he can’t help but test and see how much Keith’s flesh will yield to him now. Rubbing his hips up on the swell of Keith’s ass, he sighs. “I didn’t think it’d be _quite_ that much—”

“Uh, _yeah_, me either—”

“But I can _feel_ all those extra calories taking hold on you, y’know. You can’t hide them. Not with how chunky _you’ve_ been getting.”

As if this makes his point, Shiro stretches his hands around Keith’s hips. He digs his fingers into Keith’s pudge. He slips some of them under the lower curve of Keith’s belly, jostling it ever-so-slightly, and sinks the rest in so slowly, Keith has to bite back on a whimper and fight to keep his knees from going weak. With Keith held in place, Shiro rocks harder into his backside, rolls his hips into Keith’s ass and _fuck_, Keith shudders at that, at feeling how much give there is on him when Shiro has almost none, how plush and pliant and _flabby_ Keith’s ass has gotten—

“You can feel it, can’t you?” Humming pensively, Shiro kneads at Keith’s flesh, rolls it between his fingers. “Your stomach must jiggle so much now when you’re getting dressed. Even your bigger clothes are getting tight on you again, so you have to suck in as hard as you can and _pray _that you get your clothes on and keep them there. It must be _beautiful_, this belly all out on display, bouncing and wobbling every which way—”

“If you wanna watch sometime,” Keith bites out, wriggling on Shiro’s hips, “then all you’ve gotta do is _ask me_, Babe.”

As if he hasn’t heard anything, Shiro glides a hand down to Keith’s thigh. His touch is light as the breeze, ghosting over the faint, still-forming dimples in Keith’s flesh. But it’s enough to make Keith choke down another whine. Groping harder, Shiro finds the muscle, still intact but increasingly buried under this sagging, squeezable flab. But he doesn’t linger on it, not for long. Not when he has a handful of pudge to knead, instead.

“You’ve probably been wearing your poor jeans down to their threads, haven’t you, Baby,” Shiro purrs and kisses the top of Keith’s spine. “I mean, how could you not? They’re only simple fabric. And I’m betting you haven’t sized up like you _need_ to, recently. They can’t even dream of keeping such glorious chub under wraps—”

“Mmm, like I haven’t seen you _staring_ at me when I walk?” Keith smirks. “Your eyes are damn near _glued_ to me, Sable. I could be pacing around, looking for my phone, and you’d be ogling like you’ve never watched somebody’s thighs rub up on each other. D’you _really _think that I don’t _notice_?”

This might be a low blow because he _has_ seen Shiro staring at him—but something sounds so weirdly, naggingly familiar about Shiro’s fat-talk, so maybe? Maybe they’re getting somewhere. Maybe he gets that _Keith _is the one whose ass is rubbing on his hips and _not _the character Keith plays for the sake of making porn.

But Shiro whines like words are proving far too difficult, and Keith’s pretty sure he feels a dick twitch against his ass. Good to know for later—but for right now, he twitches his hips. He rubs up on Shiro and makes his belly wobble for the camera, and throws Shiro an easy segue line:

“You just want to get me even _bigger_, don’t you? What, you can’t be satisfied until I weigh as much as you do?”

Shiro thrusts on Keith without a word, and Keith’s knees almost give up on him. The shock of pleasure can’t be helped, though. Can’t keep itself from wracking his body with how much he _wants_. As Shiro buries his hips against Keith’s ass, Keith can’t even think of specific desires; he only _wants_. Mewling, he topples forward. Bracing himself on the wall, Keith tries to make his belly droop forward, grinds his ass right back at Shiro. That needy little whine from Shiro makes Keith smirk.

But then, Shiro’s jiggling his belly. Both of his hands are right there on Keith’s body, cupped under the lower curve and jostling his chub in slow motions that let him feel each ripple moving through his flab, each shake and how it makes. Then, Shiro bends to meet him—he sidles up on Keith’s back again and scoops up a sizable roll of pudge—and when Shiro squeezes on that fat, Keith’s mind goes blank. White-hot, same as the _fuck-fuck-wanting _that coils around Keith’s stomach and won’t let go.

Cutting into the fog, Shiro tells him, “Why would I set such a paltry goal for you? We’re practically the same weight right now. If anything, you might be _bigger_.”

“_Good_.” Keith grins. He pushes into Shiro’s hips again, and his lips strain that much more when Shiro whimpers for him. Dragging his ass up Shiro’s crotch, teasing him with that long, slow motion, Keith says, “‘cause I won’t be satisfied until I’ve got a hundred pounds on you _at least_.”

According to Shiro and Lotor’s numbers, that would put Keith up to three-fifteen, more than twice the weight he started at.

But with the way Shiro’s fingers sink into Keith’s belly—with the way he whimpers, all hot and tight and longing, right up in Keith’s ear—putting on that much weight sounds like the best idea that Keith’s had in ages.

* * *

Getting that big isn’t gonna happen by skimping on his meals, though.

Fortunately, the pizza hasn’t cooled off too much by the time he’s settled on the couch. The cheese glistens and stretches out when Keith pulls off a huge slice of the meat lovers’. He has to pinch the last bit off with his fingers, and even licking the grease off makes his stomach gurgle, reminding him that he isn’t _starving_, but God, he could be fuller. He wants to watch Shiro’s eyes bug out of his head as he tries to comprehend how much food Keith crams into himself, how Keith can even enjoy such hedonism, how he can groan contentedly while eating so much that it’s a miracle he doesn’t choke.

More than that, though, Keith _wants _to feel so completely stuffed that his seams could pop.

Wolfing down the first three slices goes by easily. He knows how to eat quickly, and how to ignore the way they settle in his stomach. A twinge or guilt twists through Keith’s chest because he’s not really taking in the taste, not fully appreciating it the way he could. That’s part of how this works, though: Keith can’t be _completely _mindless in his eating—not when he needs to mind the cameras and his angles and his co-star—but he still has to try for that as much as possible. The less he thinks about how he’s feeling, the more he can eat and the more that he’ll enjoy it, later.

Keith only hesitates halfway through the fourth piece when he catches Shiro edging toward the kitchen.

“I just need to check on something,” Shiro tells him. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

Keith tears off a bite that only leaves behind the crust. He chews. Swallows. Gives Shiro the most dead-eyed stare that he can manage while he says, “You mean you’re up to something.”

“Well, you’re not gonna get _anything_ until you finish at least half of the special pizza.” Shiro gives Keith a flat expression—but the gleam in his eyes and his too-easy shrug scream that Keith is right, and Shiro is completely up to something. But insistently playing angelic, he ruffles Keith’s hair. “Eat up, Baby. You won’t get any bigger if you don’t.”

Holding the crust to his lips, Keith calls at Shiro’s back, “I hate it when you go, but I love to watch you leave!”

Shiro trips, but doesn’t fall. Once his ass is out-of-view, Keith huffs and inhales his fifth slice of meat lovers’, just because he doesn’t want to pass up on this kind of artistry. He slows down as he takes his first slice of the special pizza.

Holding it up to his lips, Keith hesitates. Fuck, he _can’t_ eat it too quickly. His other slices are settling in his stomach, starting to tell him that he could easily stop. His belly doesn’t feel too bloated or distended, yet—but that’s only gonna last him for so long. Experience has told Keith to scarf down as much food as possible before his belly can start protesting in earnest. Shiro put so much work into making this for him, though… And the scents that come off the first slice sledgehammer Keith with _how much _they are, and how they’re so mixed up in each other, and how his mouth waters like he could flood an entire river…

Around the first bite, all Keith can do is moan. God, the mix of tastes… He can’t put words on it, not really. They come at him, all at once—sweet and savory and salty, with a hint of tang—and as he slumps back into the cushion, Keith lets his eyes slip closed. Despite his efforts, a whine comes creaking out of him. And God, he needs to appreciate Shiro’s cooking—he needs to take more time to relish in the effort that Shiro put in, and how much of an accomplishment this is, given Shiro’s precious misadventures in the kitchen—he needs to take these slices more slowly and take them in with care.

Keith’s sighing around slice number three by the time he finally hears Shiro chuckling.

“I guess I did a good job for you, then?” He tilts his head with a curious smile.

Swallowing, Keith blushes. “How long were you gone?”

“About fifteen minutes.”

Keith blinks at that figure, but more so at the glass baking pan in Shiro’s hands. “Did you make something for yourself?”

Setting the pan down, Shiro answers Keith’s question without needing to speak. He doesn’t need to shake his head like that, either. A pan full of that baked macaroni and cheese he’s learned to make? Couldn’t be for Shiro himself. For all Keith keeps eating this slice—for all he readily accepts a fourth piece of the special pizza (his _ninth_ overall, he realizes, and in a time that might be going for his personal best)—he can’t help the pang of guilt that wriggles through his chest. He hopes that he looks pensive or appreciative while he’s chewing, because once he’s swallowed, he’s pouting at Shiro.

“We could share some, y’know,” Keith says softly. “Of the macaroni, I mean? I wouldn’t mind?”

As he sits himself on an open piece of table, Shiro’s eyebrows raise—startled? God, Keith hopes so? Not that he wants to wish anything bad on Shiro, but the alternatives are far worse and wanting Shiro to feel enticed might be asking for too much? At least, can Shiro _not_ be feeling judgmental? Can he _not_ think that Keith’s crazy or trying to sabotage him or whatever? Because Keith _isn’t _going for that, he never wanted to do it beforehand either, and he _cannot _be asking too much, can he? Is Keith really so _wrong_ for wanting the guy he loves to understand that Keith doesn’t want him to be in any pain because nothing in the universe is worth that? Or for wanting the beautiful idiot to get that Keith only wants him to be happy and healthy and _well_?

Rather than clearing any of these things up, all Shiro does is point at the corner of his mouth.

When Keith frowns and quirks his shoulders, Shiro clarifies, “You’ve got sauce on your lips.”

Keith rolls his eyes while licking it up, but Shiro’s earned that.

Which Shiro must realize, if the way he blushes is any indication. “I’d rather not? If that’s okay?” Scratching at the back of his neck, Shiro says, “It’s not like I’m _opposed _to sharing? But I’d make it differently if I were going to—I think I’d die if I tried to eat it—”

“You wouldn’t _die_. Not literally. Get sick, okay, it’s kind of a lot for you, so maybe—”

“Sick enough that I don’t want to risk it.”

“But you might _not _get sick, though, right?” Shiro was never lactose intolerant, and his allergies have gotten better. But Keith can’t say that, without breaking character so he wiggles against the sofa—he winces as his belly moves but tries to push aside that pain—and takes slice number nine when Shiro hands it over. “And everybody needs to take a cheat-day once in a while, right?”

As if Shiro might learn from his example, Keith chomps off as much of this slice as he can. He wolfs the whole thing down in three bites.

“I haven’t had full-fat milk since I was fifteen, though? It might be too much for me to handle. Besides…” Shiro tongues at his lip. It’d look awkward, if not for the eager edge to the (slightly faded-looking) smirk he throws Keith’s way. “I wasn’t gonna let _anybody _else have any of this. Not when I made it special for you—”

“But what if I’m giving you my _permission_ to share it, though—”

“I’d rather see how much you can get through on your own.”

Which is fair enough, but Keith can’t help reading into the way that Shiro tightens up his abs. Or the way that he traces his fingers up and down his middle. He isn’t done with this slice yet, but he grabs in the direction of the special pizza’s pan until Shiro hands over another. Fuck, Keith can’t do this to them right now. He polishes off slice number nine so quickly that Shiro’s mouth falls open, and starts in on number ten without missing a beat. That gasp out of Shiro as Keith takes off half the slice in one go? Kindles up something devious inside Keith’s chest, makes him want to see how far he can take this.

As long as it keeps him from doubting Shiro—from worrying about what, exactly, it means that he touched his abs like that—then Keith would do just about anything. And he would very literally do anything, as long as it kept Shiro from any unnecessary pain. Popping the crust into his mouth, Keith scrunches his nose.

Shiro snorts at that and tries to hide his giggles behind his hand. Possibly, he’s laughing at the way Keith looks with a bunny nose and bulging chipmunk cheeks. What to make of it, Keith has no idea. But it doesn’t really matter, not when Shiro’s handing over Keith’s sixth slice of the special pizza. As Keith starts in on eating it, Shiro squirms and drops his hands into his lap. The coffee-table usually creaks like a door with rusty hinges, even when a skinny little shit like Lance sits on it. But as Shiro shifts from side to side, the table barely makes a sound.

Fighting off the impulse to roll his eyes, Keith throws himself back into getting this slice down. A casual glance at the pan says this is Keith’s last piece of pizza before Shiro lets him hit the mac and cheese—and that sounds better than anything.

Not that Keith doesn’t appreciate the special pizza or the work that Shiro put into making it. He’s eaten it too quickly to wax poetic about the taste. Still, the mix of tastes lingers around Keith’s mouth in between bites. There’s such a perfect blend, and it hangs around without overwhelming Keith any. He doesn’t miss any textures—the smooth, warm thickness of the sauce; the teasing hints of ricotta; the slippery surface of the peaches and the eggs versus the coarseness of the crust—and his head might feel like it’s swimming, but Keith’s mouth feels like it’s awash in absolute perfection.

With each new bite, the old tastes blend into each other perfectly. It feels so good, so right—Keith can’t help moaning. He can’t help noticing the way that Shiro stares at him and the way his eyes light up like fireworks at the sound that stumbles out of Keith’s mouth. He can’t help flushing and he’s pretty sure that it’s from the indecent way that Shiro gasps, but two can play at that game. Shiro may not have outright admitted to what gets him off yet, but Keith has more than enough ideas.

Pushing himself harder, he finishes the slice and eyes the pan. Impulse may not be the best guardian in most things, but this one—the one currently screaming at Keith to get through _one more slice_, if only to tease Shiro with how much he can put away—Keith can trust this one. It’s got the right idea. Everything might come down to how he plays this, though, which means he can’t afford to rush.

He licks his fingers, just in case he’s missing any grease. He splays a hand over his stomach, winces slightly as he shifts his hips against the sofa. His palm doesn’t find as much yield as Keith expects, or sink into that much chub at all. Rubbing himself, Keith finds his belly feeling bigger than he bargained for… Not quite rock-hard beneath his palm—it’s not as distended as it could be either, and Keith can almost picture the still-empty spaces left inside of him—but the bulge around his middle is already rounding out quite a bit… Already pushing out and straining, as if the very borderlines of his body aren’t enough to contain his girth, and if that’s the case, then Keith has no idea what kind of chance this _shirt_ has—

Trailing his fingers down his belly’s outward curve, Keith finds skin sooner than he expected, warm beneath his touch and certainly pudgier than the rest of his middle. The hem of his shirt hasn’t ridden up as far as he can get it, but it leaves the lower part of his belly exposed—and judging from Shiro’s wide-eyed gaping, Keith must be cutting quite a sight. Nowhere near as much of one as he’ll give Shiro by the end of this shoot, but the journey of a thousand miles can’t start, much less get anywhere, without Keith teasing Shiro ever-so-slightly.

Taking a deep breath, Keith winces. The inside of his stomach twists in protest, but he tries to push that feeling down. Tries to shove it to the back of his mind where it can’t get in between him and what he means to do. Each time he inhales, pulling his stomach back makes that pain return, though. Rubs Keith’s face in the tight, heavy feeling around his middle. Reminds him that one of the downsides to eating quickly? Is this moment right here, the one where Keith’s body starts catching up with him and, with a vengeance, reminds him of how much he’s already stuffed into himself, how there’s no definition anymore that would call him physically hungry and eating more could make him sick or worse.

Moving along the sofa only makes Keith pay more attention to this fact: as he worms against the cushions, his belly shuffles with him. It sweeps from side to side in long, slow motions, barely even full by Keith’s standards for one of his own stuffings but still too heavy to do much more than follow where his hips push it. Each shift makes Keith groan, sends sharp pangs jolting out through his veins and his nerves. But they don’t entirely die down when Keith settles. Instead, they peter out into more of a hot, yearning throb. Like a headache begging to be fucked.

Setting his jaw, gritting his teeth, Keith jerks his hips back. Moves to lean forward. His belly whines, first at being moved so quickly. Then, at Keith bearing down on it, trying to crunch it anywhere when it has so much shoved inside of it. The fact that he can still move means he hasn’t eaten near enough yet—but before he can reach for the pan of special pizza, Shiro’s hand lands on his shoulder.

Furrowing his brow, Keith blinks up at Shiro. All he does is shake his head and pout at Keith in unmistakable concern.

“You shouldn’t be straining yourself too hard, Baby.” Shushing softly, he guides Keith back into a recline. Rests him against the cushions again and brushes his hair off his face. “You’ve done so well with all that pizza. Don’t put too much stress on your poor tummy—”

“Oh Jesus, I can still _feed myself_—”

“I’m not saying that you _can’t_.” Shiro squeezes Keith’s shoulder before he pulls away. “I’m saying that I _want_ to help you.”

As he crouches by the floor, he keeps his eyes on Keith. Keeps giving him a sweet, plaintive frown—and consequently, he knocks the paper plate onto the floor and almost drops the giant plastic spoon. Cheeks going quite pink indeed, Shiro pays attention to dishing up Keith’s mac and cheese, to _not_ letting any of it get on the table or even worse, the floor. With the plate halfway full, Shiro hesitates. But he gets the right message from a glance backward and a sharp shake of Keith’s head. He doesn’t stop scooping up noodles until he’s gotten Keith a good, thick helping of them. Maybe they don’t fill out the well entirely, but they’re piled up on each other more than enough for Keith.

He winks at Shiro as he starts forking noodles into his mouth. He expects the way that Shiro’s eyes bug out, and the way he blushes. Even the way that Shiro ducks his head as if Keith’s a divine being and Shiro isn’t worthy enough to meet his eye or glimpse him in his full glory. There’s something exhilarating about that gesture, no matter how much Keith would rather Shiro kept looking at him—but it doesn’t catch Keith by surprise.

Nothing does—not until Shiro’s knees thump into the floor and his hands curl around Keith’s belly.

In the middle of a bite, Keith pauses chewing. Rather than talk with his mouth full, he wrinkles his nose in confusion. More so when Shiro meets that expression by shrugging easily and knotting up his brow. Keith can’t tell if Shiro’s playing innocent or if he genuinely has no idea what he’s doing. He doesn’t get any clues from the way that Shiro kneads at his bulging stomach, either. Belly rubs could easily be teasing; Shiro _knows_ how much Keith likes them.

Except Keith groans—both from the warm, gooey, savory taste of the noodles and from the pressure of Shiro working his stomach over, seeking out the tightest-packed spots and trying to ease Keith’s discomfort—and he wriggles, and Shiro smiles at him. Not like he’s a wolf who’s found the most delicious-looking sheep to eat, but like his heart could burst right out of his chest, probably in an explosion of sunlight and rainbows and glitter. He’s looking at Keith as if nothing else in the universe matters and he could only know any kind of happiness like this, here with his hands on Keith’s stomach.

As he sucks the cheese and noodles off his fork, Keith purses his lips. Maybe Lotor had a point in calling him oblivious.

No time for considering that, though. Keith’s hard limits will catch up to him eventually. His body will protest with more than the occasional belch, more than sending pain out in shocks and flooding his belly with the sort of warmth that comes from over-exertion. Even with Shiro massaging his distended gut, Keith needs to keep eating. Needs to get down as much as he knows he can—a line that’s probably fast approaching, though _maybe_ Keith can stave off its arrival—then push himself to get more food down on top of that, just to see how far he can go. Needs to push himself even further back into the cushions, easing some of the pressure off his stomach and spreading his legs as his hips edge closer to Shiro.

Not that this matters much, when Keith’s thighs refuse to let much space come between their increasingly thick chub—but Keith whines as he burrows into the cushions, and that sound makes Shiro blush scarlet, and as Keith shovels another two forkfuls past his lips, Shiro can’t stop staring at his crotch. Puckering his mouth as if he could go in for a kiss, Shiro brushes the back of his hand against the erection straining against Keith’s shorts.

“Well, what’s this—”

“You _know _what it is, asshole,” Keith bites out, affectionately rolling his eyes.

His belly gurgles—which, at the moment, feels like his body’s trying to vocalize how he’s really feeling about this teasing—and he gets down more noodles, as if that might smother his gut’s attempted complaints. Watching Shiro play dumb like this _could _be cute, if not for how obtuse he’s been in regards to Keith reciprocating his feelings. As Keith fails to silence his belly’s grousing about how much he’s stuffing into it—fails to tune out the pain that his stomach keeps trying to stick him with as punishment for not calling it quits, but digging into the noodles over and over and over again—he really can’t deal with any of that garbage. Even being reminded of how willfully stupid his beloved can be makes Keith’s heart twist itself in knots.

Thankfully, Shiro keeps one hand on Keith’s stomach. He leaves the other resting against Keith’s crotch, and whisper-softly, he nudges that hand against Keith’s cock as he sinks the other’s fingers into a particularly taut place around Keith’s waist. Shiro makes sensation flare up all over Keith’s body. The heat that he’s put into his own stomach. The pressure that Shiro’s putting on those full spots, trying to undo the knots and help Keith digest. The caress around his dick—a groan crawls up from deep inside Keith’s chest. His hips buck toward Shiro’s touch without waiting for his input, rock him harder into Shiro’s hand. Which only makes Keith burn hotter. Makes him want more. He grinds without any direction or plan in mind, aside from getting more.

Shiro’s hands dart away from him. But before Keith can complain, Shiro asks him to hold still a moment. He curls his fingers up in the waistband of Keith’s boxer-briefs. Shiro looks up at him, wide-eyed and hesitant until Keith summons the presence of mind to nod—then, he grins so gratefully, Keith can’t resist. While Shiro peels off his underwear, Keith reaches over to tuck the white forelock behind Shiro’s ear.

He really ought to resume his pigging out, but instead, he lets himself linger on Shiro’s cheek. Traces the backs of his fingers down Shiro’s high cheekbones. For all he’s gotten used to seeing them out in the open like this—for all he’s touched Shiro like this since he came home and for all he _knows_ that Shiro has so much less substance filling out his face—Keith tilts his head and huffs curiously at what he feels. The planes and angles… He _knows_ that they’re here, that they’re Shiro’s everyday reality now. But that’s so different from _feeling_ Shiro’s cheekbones so close to his skin, from getting his hand all over the lack of chub around Shiro’s mouth and the knife’s edge jawline that he’s wanted for so long.

He smirks when all of this gentle touching makes Shiro blush redder than anything else has done today—which shouldn’t be possible, and yet? Here Shiro is, kneeling between Keith’s legs and impersonating an incredibly flustered tomato. The color spills onto Shiro’s neck, stretches up to the tips of his ears, and for a moment, Shiro rubs his hands against Keith’s thighs like he doesn’t recall that other parts of Keith’s body even exist. Telling him to get back on-track with what they’re doing? He goes so still, that might be asking for too much.

Jesus, they’re making kinky porn all over their sofa, but Shiro holds up like can’t remember himself because Keith touched his face? If he’s had it this bad for Keith and if he’s done it for as long as Ryou, Lance, and Lotor claim, then Hunk has probably pulled more punches than not on his exasperation. Which is about as nice as a root canal done without anesthesia—so, Keith cups his hand around Shiro’s cheek and nudges him into looking up.

Eyes going all soft and dewy, Shiro doesn’t really rouse until Keith blows him a kiss.

He doesn’t get himself back together and get Keith’s underwear off until Keith wiggles his hips. It jostles his belly, but at least it’s getting easier for Keith to repress his wincing, to ignore those warning shots of pain. When he settles back onto the sofa—bare ass scraping against the fabric that’s not quite rough but not exactly soft, either—Keith only has two things on his mind.

First of all, filling himself up until he can’t move on his own power. That he could still help Shiro get him out of his drawers means Keith has yet more room to fill. Hitting the bottom of his plate is a milestone, yes—thinking of how many calories he’s eaten so far makes his head spin like somebody’s smacked him—but Keith pouts at Shiro for more, please.

Secondly—and more importantly—Shiro’s hands fall back into place on Keith’s middle, just as soon as he’s dished up more noodles. Even if he _could_ currently tell how big this helping is, compared to the previous one, Keith wouldn’t have the presence of mind to appreciate it. All that he can focus on is the repeat motion of stuffing himself—fork, chew swallow, fork, chew, swallow, rinse, lather, repeat, fork, chew, swallow—and the way that Shiro’s hands move on his tummy. Eating and Shiro, Shiro and eating, nothing else matters, not right now, not when everything around Keith is getting so warm, threatening to envelop him in a lazy fog that won’t let him keep eating how he wants…

One of Shiro’s hands pulls away again, and Keith whines to get it back. He winces when shimmying makes his belly scream at him to _stop making it move, it’s too full, it wants a break from this_—but when Shiro dabs a sheen of sweat off his forehead, Keith can’t remember what regret feels like. He smirks down at Shiro as he forks more noodles into his mouth—

Then, Shiro’s fingers ghost along Keith’s sides. He slips them under the hem of Keith’s shirt and guides it up. Brings it to the upper curve of Keith’s belly. Lets it rest there, but only until he convinces Keith to let go of his plate. A promise to give it right back helps, and once Shiro tosses Keith’s shirt aside, he makes good on that. He watches, rapt, as Keith dives right back into eating, but doesn’t ease up on rubbing Keith’s belly. Not for too long.

“_God_, look at you.” Shiro’s voice isn’t so soft that the mic could miss it, but his tone makes Keith pause, mid-chew. He furrows his brow, but Shiro doesn’t notice. He’s too busy leaning in and kissing Keith’s belly-button. Kneading along the sides of Keith’s stomach, Shiro whispers, “You’re really getting chubby, Baby—”

Snorting almost sends Keith’s noodles down the wrong tube. Still, Shiro’s _commentary _isn’t exactly his A-game material.

_Tell me something that I _**_don’t_**_ know, Stud,_ Keith can’t say, because he has noodles in need of eating.

“I mean, you weren’t going to get anything _but_ chubby, with the way you eat…” Shiro’s hands—Jesus God, he knows the _exact_ right ways to get his fingertips into Keith’s flesh—he works them over Keith so well, finding the right spots to rub before Keith even knows that they need extra attention. “It’s amazing, Baby. Watching you go in on meals like this… And all those calories—I can’t even? D’you have any idea how many calories you’ve eaten today?”

Keith swallows and looks down into a wide-eyed, expectant expression. “I dunno, a _lot_? Why don’t you tell me.”

“Oh. Erm.” Shiro’s cheeks twinge pink and his hands drop into Keith’s lap. “I thought _you_ might know. Or have a better idea—I didn’t really think that you would _know_ for sure, since you’re, like? Because I don’t have the numbers—”

“You’re the one who _made the food_—”

“Okay, I’ll pay better attention, next time you want to do this—”

“Numbers are just numbers. They’re good to know, but—”

“I want to know, Baby. Having a better fix on how much you’re eating at any given point… I want to, y’know, get that? Because you can really eat, but it’s still like…” He’s going red, as if Keith—or his clients and subscribers, for that matter—has any room to judge. “I don’t want to underestimate you again.”

_I don’t hold that against you… I didn’t see it coming, either_, Keith doesn’t say because he’s chewing.

But he combs his fingers through Shiro’s white forelock, pushing it back off his face. He hopes this gets the message across. Some version of it, anyway. Whatever he conveys, he wants Shiro to get _something_ out of him, something positive, because Shiro deserves to know that he isn’t screwing anything up. Not in Keith’s eyes, which are the ones that matter most, if anyone wants Keith’s opinion.

Whether he does or doesn’t get Shiro to understand that he’s doing fine, Shiro picks back up on massaging Keith’s stomach. If he were only easing up on the pressure inside Keith’s belly, that’d be one thing. Except Shiro’s getting his hands all over Keith’s stomach, teasing them up toward Keith’s chest. When he cups Keith’s belly around its lower curve, Shiro gets so close to Keith’s crotch that it’s a miracle he doesn’t make any incidental contact. Like Keith’s dick really needed more reason to throb. Like he _needs_ to have his face rubbed in the fact that Shiro won’t put his allegedly legendary blow-job skills to work already.

“How does it feel, eating like this? Stuffing your face, cramming food into your belly… Such a round, beautiful little belly… Not gonna stay _little_ at this rate, though. It’s already so much bigger than you were before, but _God_, Baby, with the way you eat…”

With a longing, wistful sigh, Shiro kisses Keith’s stomach again. He traces his tongue up one of Keith’s stretch marks, then sucks on that same spot. _Shit_—his lips and his teeth and his whole beautiful, stupid mouth… They all lavish attention on Keith’s skin like Shiro means to leave him with a hickey, and the shivers make Keith twitch. In turn, that makes Keith jostle his own belly, and he whines. His hips buck up at nothing in particular. Bump his tummy into Shiro’s nose. Keith groans as he drops back into place—God, he should be more careful with his movements while he can still make any on his own, but would it kill _Shiro_ to give up a bit more?

Would it seriously, hand to God murder him to make it so Keith doesn’t need to work for any orgasms, not right now? Kisses are great, there’s no denying. They’re wonderful on their own and more so, considering how Shiro knows what the fuck he’s doing with his mouth. But Jesus, his lips are so smooth, and his mouth is _so warm_, and his hands are _right there_, down around Keith’s crotch but refusing to touch his cock again, and Shiro could _so easily _be doing so much more for Keith than kissing him—

“How does it feel when you eat like this, Baby,” Shiro asks as though that’s actually a question.

From someone else, it might be a question. If Lance or Allura were saying that, Keith would believe that they have no idea how eating this much feels—but Shiro used to be able to put away food like this without even thinking about it. He can’t have forgotten, not considering how he still holds his old habits against himself. Putting thought into what he ate was _kryptonite_ to how much he could eat. When he was in that kind of mood, he never thought about it until he hit a wall and got his body’s limitations rubbed in his face. Keith has to keep going—he has to get so much down food that even Shiro literally can’t believe that Keith found the grit to eat so much—but until he does? There’s no way that Shiro can’t tell how Keith is feeling.

As he kneads Keith’s belly, he as good as outright admits to that: “So much food in front of you, and it’s a good thing that it’s all for you because you can’t control yourself. Maybe you used to have that kind of restraint, but…” He presses hard into a tight knot around Keith’s belly-button and snickers when he makes Keith belch. “Yeah, exactly. Never could’ve made you do that before you let go and let yourself plump up like this—”

Grumbling wordlessly, Keith shoves his empty plate at Shiro for a refill. Dutiful as ever, Shiro doesn’t miss a beat in scooping it up for him. He pauses instead of handing it over, though. He takes a deep whiff of the macaroni and cheese, makes himself whine as if he would let himself eat it after whatever he’s done to doctor up his cheese sauce. Keith whines, too—but only because that’s _his_ food and Shiro isn’t giving it back. Holding up like this, forcing a pause into the air between them… It’s letting Keith feel the weight of everything he’s already stuffed into himself. He cringes and his legs squirm—

He winces when his toes collide with something harder than he expected. Pouting, Shiro swats Keith on the knee. It doesn’t hurt, isn’t even remotely uncomfortable. It’s like Keith’s a piece of string, getting batted around between two newborn kittens.

“You didn’t have to _kick_ me, Baby.” He sulks—but his eyes glimmer as he squeezes a roll of chub along Keith’s thigh. “Anyway, you shouldn’t waste the calories. We don’t know for sure how many you’ve eaten today… And you’re bound to be spending more on simple things, with all these extra pounds you’ve added…”

Keith’s eyes dull over and he arches an eyebrow. As far as dirty fat-talk goes? Something so blatantly credulity-straining is the sort of effort that Keith would expect from a newbie. Or from someone who didn’t like Keith’s body once he got above a certain weight, or at least didn’t get anything from this cluster of kinks and wanted to talk around them.

From Shiro, it means that he’s trying too hard, in addition to denying Keith his macaroni.

Without handing over the plate, Shiro presses his whole palm and his long, firm fingers into Keith’s middle. He squeezes as if he grab up Keith’s entire stomach. If anyone Keith knows could manage doing that, it would be Shiro or his brother, them and their ridiculously oversized hands. A jostle makes Keith belch again, a bit too loudly, if you ask him—but Shiro’s face makes up for everything.

He’s beautiful, Shiro. This shouldn’t draw Keith’s attention, and yet it does. He shouldn’t see anything new in Shiro’s face because objectively, there’s nothing new about it. His cheekbones have always been so high, no matter how much chub he had around them. His lips have always had that perfect, full, Cupid’s bow curve to them. His eyes have always been this exact shade of grey, with their long lashes and the unspeakable gentleness that can settle Keith’s nerves like nothing else and always makes him feel like he’s exactly right where he belongs.

Yet, there _is_ something different in Shiro’s face. As he tightens his grip around Keith’s cock—not enough to hurt, but enough that Keith moans more from the contact than from his forkful of macaroni—there’s a glimmer behind his eyes that Keith’s never seen before. At least, he can’t remember seeing this. Not even anything like it. Shiro’s entire face lights up, excited maybe, but there’s an edge to that excitement, as if he knows that he’s getting into something potentially dangerous. Like he’s sticking his hand right into a nest of vipers, fully aware of the risks and daring those motherfucking snakes to bite him, if they aren’t a pack of cowards.

Which, actually, sounds more like something that Keith or Lance would do—but the edge of grim delight that’s all over Shiro’s features? Jesus Christ, it’s gorgeous. As he strokes up Keith’s length and kneads at Keith’s belly, Shiro doesn’t need to say anything. All he needs to do is smile that smile—look at Keith with such a mix of adoration and eagerness, with that edge to it as if he’s been starving for a touch like this for who even knows how long—work his hand up and down Keith’s cock ever so slowly, dragging his thumb behind the rest of his hand and letting it press into the underside of Keith’s shaft, so dangerously close to the vein, right along places that Shiro _cannot possibly_ know are extra sensitive for Keith—

That’s all it takes to set every part of Keith on fire. He could come undone right now, and he _so wants to_—

But he doesn’t let himself. No, not yet. There’s more room in his belly left to fill, even if his stomach doesn’t want Keith thinking so. No matter how much his insides protest—no matter how much his belly groans with each bite of macaroni he shovels past his lips, then moans and gurgles when Keith swallows too quickly—Keith can keep going, which means he can’t allow himself to come. Regardless of how well Shiro works him over—no matter how long it’s already been, and no matter how much his body feels alternately stuffed too tight and wound up too much, a plump line of heat that’s going to explode if he’s not careful—nothing about that matters because Keith _needs_ to drag this out even further. Needs to keep going, so Shiro has more room to work.

He needs to hang on for as long as he can manage. Even if it’s easier said than done.

Biting on his lip, Keith whines. Tries to think about anything but the food he’s eating, anything but the pain building up in his belly, anything but Shiro’s one hand rubbing on his midsection and Shiro’s other hand working up and down his cock. About Lance blubbering and ugly-crying over the end of _Toy Story 3_, the way that he does every single time, as if he hasn’t seen the movie already. About Shiro crying in any context that didn’t involve consensual pain. About tax returns—fuck, April’s not that far away, is it? Fuck, Keith doesn’t envy the IRS agent who has to go over his tax returns, who has to paw through all the statements of how much money Keith makes off selling niche-interest amateur porn on the Internet.

It works, enough. Keith breathes a bit more easily. The deep breaths center him. On one hand, the oxygen is good and probably, Keith needs it. On the other hand, though, pain jolts through him, shocking out from his belly—_fantastic_. He’s eaten enough that he’s starting to hurt when he breathes. The last few bites on this plate, Keith needs to force his way through. Needs to drag himself through eating because if he doesn’t, he’ll never finish and sure, Shiro will let him come, but Keith won’t feel like he’s earned it.

As Shiro takes Keith’s plate for another refill, another eager grin springs up on his features. It makes Keith’s heart do an elaborate somersault routine, definitely Gold Medal-worthy—and if anything, watching Shiro dish him up more noodles? Helps Keith steady himself. Taking in how much of the pan he’s emptied? Gives him something real that he can focus on. Something that proves how far he’s come and as good as verifies that he can keep going, if he puts his mind to it. If he refuses to give up. Shiro wouldn’t give up, if their positions were reversed and _he_ was the one who got off on letting Keith watch him eat.

_Shiro_ wouldn’t give up if _Keith_ were the one kneeling at his feet and telling him that he’s doing so well, so very well—“God, look at yourself, Baby,” Shiro whispers, “getting all plump, and stuffed, and full, and round for me… I can’t, I can’t even? You’re like magic, Akira, you really are”—but there’s no shame in pausing if he needs to, or stopping if he’s had too much. Even though there’s nothing bad about asserting limits, Shiro wouldn’t give up on Keith—and so help him, Keith doesn’t want to give up on Shiro. He will not allow himself to give up on Shiro.

Not even in the context of how long he can or cannot hold off on an orgasm.

“You’re _amazing_, Baby,” Shiro promises, sealing it with a kiss at the head of Keith’s cock. “Everything about you is amazing. Watching you stuff your face like this… It’s poetry. Real live poetry. You don’t even know what all you do to me, do you? You’re so busy cramming that food into your mouth—so busy stuffing this belly—” The hand on Keith’s middle jostles the huge, firm mound of stomach, engorged and sticking out so far, it edges toward Keith’s cock when he shifts the wrong way. “—You’re so busy filling yourself up with everything that you can get your beautiful, greedy little hands on… You don’t even notice what you make me feel, do you?”

_Yeah_, Keith keeps to himself because it’s one of his own thoughts, not Akira’s. _Because you of all the fucking people on this godforsaken planet? Have any business telling _**_me_**_ that I don’t notice how you look at me. Or don’t see what I’m doing to you. Or don’t_—

A groan crawls out of Keith’s mouth and almost knocks out a bite of macaroni. His hips buck of their own accord, knocking up through Shiro’s hand. Toward Shiro’s lips. The movement jerks his stomach too hard—_oh, no_.

Keith inhales sharply—_double oh no_.

The pain shocks through him like he stuck a wet fork in a power outlet. Making himself take slower breaths—deeper, slower, something to steady his nerves while hopefully hurting less—Keith shudders. Shivers. Drops onto the sofa and tries to pull up thoughts of how fuck-ugly Lance’s technically good-looking face gets when he cries over Disney/Pixar movies.

Which gets him through swallowing his cheesy noodles, at least. And good breaths come a bit more easily, once his mouth isn’t full of macaroni. But Shiro keeps twisting his long, firm fingers around the base of Keith’s cock. His other hand stays on Keith’s belly, holding it back. Kneading into the taut, straining flesh—but only because Shiro can’t lick his way up Keith’s shaft if he has Keith’s pudgy belly getting in the way. Probably, Shiro’s only rubbing Keith right now because it’s more convenient for him and it doesn’t matter a lick whether or not Keith gets anything out of it. Doesn’t matter how he rolls his hips, trying to nudge his belly further into Shiro’s hips. Much less how he groans when Shiro pushes back so much harder than before.

Except that can’t be true. Not with Shiro. Sable, maybe, depending on how Shiro’s trying to play him for this clip—but _Shiro himself _would never use Keith like that. When he looks up at Keith again, this truth is clear, spelled out in everything from the gleam in his eyes (edge to it or not, there’s something so soft about Shiro’s expression, something so _good_ that kicks Keith in the chest and makes him wonder how long he’s been on the receiving end of faces like this), to the slight, awed parting of his stupid, beautiful, perfect lips.

“Look at me is _right_, Sable,” Keith splutters, just so Shiro can’t get wrapped up in his own head and forget what they’re doing here. “God, I’m such a mess… I’m rock-hard from stuffing my face. Like I even needed any more of that… I’m stuffed practically to bursting but I still want soooo much _more_…” _I’m _**_panting_**_ because you’re a fucking _**_tease_**_ who won’t get on with what I need already and I don’t want to disappoint you for this… _“I’m such a fat fuck… Completely hopeless, don’t know how you even—”

“Don’t talk about yourself like that, Baby.” Whether this is Shiro talking or Sable, Keith can’t quite figure. But hey, if it lets him stay on the receiving end of this wide-eyed look like he’s the center of Shiro’s universe—if whatever Shiro thinks he’s on about means that Keith gets that big, strong hand pinching and rubbing all up and down the distended curve of his stomach—then he isn’t certain if he _cares_ which side of Shiro’s talking. “You’re beautiful like this—I mean, you were _always_ beautiful, even before you put on weight? But the way you are, now? All plump, and round, and chubby… You get a glow to your cheeks when you eat like this, y’know? You look so _good_, and _happy_, and that’s all I ever wanted for you…”

Listening to him go on, Keith still can’t figure if this is coming more from Shiro or his character. It sounds more and more like Shiro, but given that Shiro was adamant about how he could keep himself and his character separate, everything could go either way—but on the other hand? That’s a problem for Future-Keith to deal with. Present-Keith doesn’t have the mental energy to pick apart subtleties that might not even be there in the first place because he could be reading too much into things again.

Present-Keith very much needs to rock his hips again, nudging his cock toward Shiro. He smirks when the head smears pre-come on the corner of Shiro’s mouth. It earns him a roll of the eyes and a flick of Shiro’s wrist—a quick twist around the base of his cock that makes Keith shudder so hard, he drops back into the sofa like a puppet with the strings cut—but holy shit—

“_Worth it_,” Keith hisses, giving Shiro an Incredibly Self-Satisfied Grin.

Scooping up the last bit of macaroni, he lobs the plate aside. Twines his fingers up in Shiro’s hair. Might be easier if he still had his undercut. Or if he didn’t have it tied back in a ponytail. _Definitely_ if they didn’t have cameras and angels to consider. But Shiro’s long bangs make a perfect home for Keith’s hands. He brushes them off of Shiro’s face, but doesn’t let up with just that. Combing through them—and _God_, Shiro’s hair is softer than ever; Keith could touch it all night, whether Shiro lets him com4 or not—Keith tries to give Shiro a longing, wanting moan.

Instead, the sound comes out high and tight and warbling. Tauter than Keith’s belly. More of a whimper than anything else. Definitely not what Keith wanted to do. Not the sound that would tell Shiro how he’s really feeling and what he really, _really _wants. What he’s burning for, so hot that he has no idea how his cock hasn’t set Shiro’s hand on fire—

“_Please_?” Keith whispers. “God, please, I need—”

“Sssh, Baby.” Shiro presses into Keith’s belly, massaging a spot that feels particularly stuffed, going at Keith’s flesh so gently that it almost feels like a tease. “You’ve done so well, okay? So, _so_ good… You look so gorgeous with your belly so big and round for me—”

“But I need—can you just—I lo—”

Shushing him softly, Shiro pushes harder into Keith’s belly than he did before. Cuts him off mid-word because Keith can’t stop himself from gasping. Makes Keith’s hips buck up toward him as his back digs into the sofa and his throat betrays everything he’s feeling, from the wanting to the lust, to the heavy, loaded word that he’s thought for _so long_ that Shiro had to know applied to their situation better than anything else, to the fire burning in the pit of his chest that _needs to get released right fucking now_.

Singularly unbothered—or doing an uncommonly good job of acting like it—Shiro twists his hand around Keith’s cock in slow, firm motions. The other hand shoves into Keith’s belly so hard that first, Keith belches. Shiro eases up for just a moment, and when he doubles back, he finds a spot that he must’ve missed until right now, this second. Keith’s gasp quivers like a bowstring and quickly devolves into a moan, and there’s so much going on in that sound. It’s as good as letting Keith spit out what he almost said, except for how Shiro will almost certainly remain a fucking idiot about hearing how Keith feels. Writing it off because of whatever goes on in his head and his heart that makes him feel like Keith would never, ever return his feelings.

But it’s for the best, that interruption. Probably definitely a good thing that Keith didn’t spit out the _“L is for the way you look at me” _word in its full glory. They are not, after all, shooting _that_ kind of porno. Not the kind where the stars actually pretend to be in love.

Whatever kind of porno they _are_ making, it involves Shiro licking his way up and down Keith’s shaft as if he’s painting a masterpiece. Slowly, carefully. Like he’s got a reputation to uphold and doesn’t want to disappoint. Tugging on his white fringe, Keith tries to tell him that it’s fine, he’s good, there’s nothing about a blow-job from him that could possibly let Keith down—but no words come out of him. Only throaty, keening sounds that get stuck on the border between want and need.

Shiro gets the message, though. He only holds up to kiss the head of Keith’s cock, to lap up the pre-come with a smile that looks downright devious. It’s one thing for him to pull that stunt—but then he _has_ to meet Keith’s eyes. As Shiro takes Keith into his mouth, he _has_ to lock right on Keith’s face and refuse to look anywhere else. He has to hold that eye-contact for long enough that Keith’s face flushes hot and red, and his head feels ready to spin clean off his shoulders, and he could be sick—but he _can’t _tell if that’s coming from how much he ate or from the way that Shiro’s looking at him.

Shiro needs to do this because of course he does. Because he has no idea what he does to Keith.

God, _fuck_—he can’t miss the effect his mouth has, though. He sucks, pulling his lips even tighter on Keith’s shaft. He works up and down, first slowly—so goddamn slowly, Keith shudders, even from the slightest flit of tongue or accidental scrape of teeth against his skin. But Shiro speeds up when Keith tugs on his hair and whines. Each time he pulls up, it feels like he’s going away. Like he’s gonna disappear, leave Keith high and dry, with blue balls and a suspicious, glaring lack of the man he’s so embarrassingly in love with—

But Shiro doesn’t go. Doesn’t leave. Always comes back, taking more and more Keith into his mouth, sighing contentedly as he goes lower and lower on Keith’s cock. His breaths hit Keith’s skin like hurricanes. The wet sides of his mouth, like getting drenched out in the rain. Keith’s hands ball up into white-knuckled fists. One yanks on Shiro’s white bangs; the other punches the sofa cushion. Which doesn’t make Keith feel better. Doesn’t unknot anything pent-up inside him. Doesn’t let him break down and unravel, doesn’t give release, relief, or any other—

He gasps as Shiro pulls back. Whines as Shiro kisses his cock-head one more time, as his beautiful tongue flicks around the mess of pre-come. His cock throbs—fuck, his heartbeat’s pounding down there, and everything that Shiro’s doing only makes it worse—but Keith regrets biting his lip as soon as Shiro looks him in the eye again. Not even the quick, too-careless way that Shiro jerks his hand around Keith’s shaft could be worse than getting caught in the act of being flushed, and sick with wanting, and knowing good and goddamn well that Shiro probably won’t get even halfway through something loosely adjacent to the fucking message about how Keith really feels—

“So beautiful,” Shiro whispers, running his thumb along the underside of Keith’s cock. “My gorgeous, plumped up fat-boy…”

With a deep breath, he takes Keith into his mouth again, goes almost all the way. Laps at Keith’s skin, tongue flitting against Keith’s vein. Works his lips Sucks like he’s trying to drain Keith’s life-force through his cock. Whatever Shiro thinks he’s going for, it doesn’t take Keith long.

_God, fuck, yes_—everything flares up, white-hot. His legs twitch as the heat inside him boils over. Heels slam against the sofa.

One hand slams into the cushion like it stole something from him. The other pulls so hard on Shiro’s hair that he lets slip a whine.

Keith’s hips roll as his orgasm unfurls, pushing him further into Shiro’s mouth as he comes utterly undone.

But even the pain of jerking his overstuffed belly so hard, too fast, knocking it into Shiro’s palm without being ready for that contact? Quickly subsides as Keith collapses, boneless and limp and, more than anything else, _fucking satisfied_.

Keith winces through his first deep, slow breath. But the ones that trail along afterward get easier. He groans softly when Shiro squeezes his knee. Mumbles something about how good that was. Shiro’s saying something, too. He’s dropping kisses and tracing the backs of his fingers along the inside of Keith’s thigh, saying _something_ warm, and fond, and it’s probably about Keith. God help him, Keith should pay attention. Should work harder on focusing and picking out the words, making any sense of whatever Shiro’s saying—

Except only one thing’s coming in clearly enough: Keith’s belly. Pain, and roiling, and—_Oh, God_…

“Shiro?” He croaks, blushing at how small his voice comes out sounding. “Shiro, please, I—’m gonna be sick if we don’t—”

“Ssssh, Baby, it’s okay.” Shiro leaps to his feet, moves the plate, and eases Keith into lying down. Brushing Keith’s bangs off his face, giving him that same starry-eyed look as before, Shiro kisses his forehead. “I’ve got you, Baby. You’re gonna be okay.”

* * *

“So, what was the surprise?”

Shiro startles at this question, fumbling and dropping his paperback copy of_ Attack of the Vampire Nymphomaniacs from Planet Zandarr_. They’ve been sitting quietly for about three episodes of _Parks and Rec_, at least that Keith’s seen. How he hasn’t gotten is beyond him. How he can be awake right now leaves Keith mystified. Maybe if Shiro were still topless, that’d be one thing; he put a shirt back on before he put the food away, though.

But since Keith’s not sleeping and there are only so many times he can endure the subplot about Ann Perkins having platonic Hanahaki over Leslie Knope, Keith has unanswered questions and they’re very much worth asking. Unfortunately for his curiosity, Shiro mostly has the pursed-lip, wide-eyed look of someone who got busted with both hands in the cookie jar.

Keith winces as he squirms along the couch. “Whatever you did to the chicken on the meat pizza. I ate too fast. I didn’t pick up on it. So… What was the surprise, exactly?”

“Oh. That.” Hunching his shoulders, Shiro scrubs a hand over the back of his neck. “There… I didn’t actually do _anything_ to the chicken, I just thought…” He quirks his shoulders and tries to look innocent. “Maybe telling you I had would make you want to eat more? Like, so you could try to figure out what the surprise was?”

Rolling his eyes would take more energy than Keith wants to expend on Shiro’s nonsense right now. Still, he finds it in himself to muss his hand over Shiro’s hair instead. Because Shiro’s being a dweeb, as per his usual, but it’s cute, after a fashion. And it’s endearing, for some value of the term. And honestly, Shiro could do a lot worse by both of them than tricking Keith about the pizza in the name of making him eat more.

Vaguely, Keith wants to give Shiro some kind of comeback. Wants to do or say something more.

Rather than let him find the right words, Shiro sighs and leans his head back. It gives Keith better access to the white forelock—but then Shiro has to go and say, “I really did want to tell you about the scar on my own. Not making you find out like this. At least, I knew I’d need to bring it up so we could cover them, eventually—”

Keith lets himself cringe, because at least the ceiling won’t take it personally. “Yeah, okay. I mean, it _really_ would’ve been awkward if I’d found out when you’re supposed to be fucking me. Or getting fucked by me. Or whichever.”

Shiro makes a sound that refuses to let Keith decipher it and gently knocks his head against the sofa. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Look, if you thought that people would get mad at you for it—”

“Because Hunk _did_ get mad at me for it—”

“Did he _say_ that, though?”

“No, but… I mean, he’s been mad at me for _whatever_ reason since Lotor and I got back—”

“I don’t think he’s _really_ mad at you. Or that it’s all on whatever went on with you needing surgery—”

“Not _entirely_, no, but…” Shiro taps his head on the sofa again, and his silence makes Keith feel like interrupting right now would be unfairly cruel. Leaning toward Keith’s fingers again, Shiro huffs. “Yes, I was afraid of how you’d take it. And I didn’t want to risk you getting upset with me about it. But part of it had nothing to do with that, and everything to do with how I felt.”

“All of this had everything to do with how you felt,” Keith points out, when he feels like Shiro might be done talking. If he isn’t done, then giving him a nudge can’t hurt. “You _felt_ like Hunk is mad at you. You _felt_ like The Gang would judge you for this. You _felt_ like I might—”

“Okay, I deserve that—”

“No, you just need to hear it. There’s a difference—”

“My point is more like…” Shiro slides his paperback across the coffee-table and groans when it falls off the edge. “I’m trying to draw a line between me being afraid of other people’s reactions, and me dealing with things that are _completely_ internal. That don’t have _anything_ to do with other people because they’re all about me, and my comfort, and how I feel about myself.”

That’s a fair enough line to draw, Keith guesses.

Of course, it would be a more effective line if Shiro didn’t need to be reminded that he’s allowed to speak. There are worse things that he could ask of Keith, though. There are things that Keith might legitimately mind doing, as opposed to petting Shiro’s hair, which is a privilege more than anything.

“I was ashamed,” Shiro admits. “Not because they were ugly or anything—”

“Like I was _really_ going to accuse you of being _that fucking vain_—”

“_You_ wouldn’t.” Between Shiro’s tone and the way he ducks his chin, there can be no mistaking what he means.

“If anyone else said anything like that to you? I’ll fight them for you. Tell me who it was—”

“Do you _really_ want to fight me about it? Because _I’m_ the one who’s been telling me that I only hate them because they’re ugly.”

Keith tries to roll onto his side so he can glare at Shiro—and he promptly whines. Pain shocks through him, radiating out from the still-quite-hard lump around his middle, and _fuck_. Right. Bad idea. Very, very bad idea. He can’t make his voice work properly. Can’t make his throat quit putting the pain out there for long enough to use his words while he isn’t feeling totally non-verbal. Instead, Keith gestures at the coffee-table. Thankfully, Shiro slips up into sitting on it without missing a beat.

Now that Keith can see his face, though, he can’t make himself give Shiro the expression that he’d planned on. For all Shiro isn’t crying, his eyes glisten as if he might start. His shoulders are hunched and tight, like a cat’s, and trying to sit up straight only makes him slouch again. His attempt at keeping his face neutral comes up pouting, but he doesn’t have the decency to look petulant. Contrition, unfortunately, comes through in every twitch of his lips, how deeply he’s furrowed his brow, and how he keeps trying to relax his face as if Keith might not notice what it’s doing.

With a sigh, Keith reaches over to brush the backs of his fingers down Shiro’s shin. “You aren’t shallow like that, Kashi.”

“That’s what I’ve been feeling like, though?” He shrugs. Shakes his head. Rests on one palm while dragging the other hand through his white forelock. “I couldn’t hold anything like that against myself for the surgery, no. But I keep looking at the scars and being like, ‘God, these are hideous.’ Then, I look at how I haven’t told anybody… And it’s not this simple, but? What if I’m only doing it because I don’t want anyone to know I have them. What if I’m only doing it because I want them to keep thinking that I really—”

“You didn’t have the surgery because you wanted to lose weight though, right? Or get full-on abs. Or whatever?”

“No. And I’d lost _most_ of the weight already. On my own. Or, well… I mean, I had help? But it was… Medical supervision and Lotor.”

“That’s not like you’re cheating. If you’ve even been _thinking_ of telling yourself anything like that—”

“Back when I started, I did. Now, I’ve gotten put in my place about it too many times to keep telling myself that. By Lotor, Ryou, my doctors, Satomi and Naoko, Lotor—I already said him, but he talked me down too many times for one person…” With a soft huff, Shiro uncurls his leg so Keith can have an easier time of stroking his shin. “It’s just, like? I _know_ that I’m being unreasonable. And I _know_ that I’m ignoring actual reality. But I still feel like there must’ve been _something_ _else_ that I could’ve done—”

“Medical necessity, Shiro—”

“I mean, _before_ I needed surgery. Even that’s unreasonable, though? I wanted to get used to the extra skin. And to not actually hitting my goal weight because of it. Because I felt better in all the ways that mattered most, and Lotor had a point about…” Shiro rotates his hand, batting at nothing in particular as he tries to find the words that he wants. “He said the excess skin was evidence of how far I’d come and how much work I’d put in?”

Keith can see Lotor’s point, he guesses. But he also knows better than to say so right now. Interrupting Shiro might derail his train of thought—and based on the way he combs his fingers through his hair again? Shiro’s already having more than enough trouble with making his thoughts and his vocabulary behave.

He brushes his hair off his face a good five times before he manages to say, “I keep doubting myself, y’know? Feeling like, ‘There _must_ have been something else I could’ve done. But maybe I didn’t do it because I _wanted_ to get the skin removed—so who cares that I had no idea I could even get an infection like that. Who cares that I didn’t know it could get bad enough to need anything more than some prescription skin cream, _maybe_. Because I’ve wanted abs for so long. What if I screwed myself over so I could…’”

Keith lets Shiro trail off. He lets himself sigh. He lets the silence settle in between them while both of them wonder if there’s literally anything that they can say to this. At least, Keith trusts that’s what Shiro has on his mind. Anything else might be infinitely worse.

With a sigh, Keith squeezes Shiro’s knee and makes himself look Shiro in the eye.

“Would it help if we didn’t cover them up, next time?” He slips his hand up onto Shiro’s thigh, under the hem of his shorts. “Because we could come up with a backstory about why Sable has them… You wouldn’t need to hide them? And I don’t know, it could…”

He only trails off because Shiro’s smiling at him. That good old soft, dewy smile that no one else gets out of him.

Looking at Keith as if the world begins and ends with him, Shiro nods. “How about I sleep on it, Baby?”


	13. Chapter 13

Group work-sessions at Allura, Ryou, and Lance’s place are always something of a crap-shoot. More so on the day after Valentine’s Day, but not until after Lance comes down from the holiday-related haze. Doubly more so when Shiro is the only person whose current project likely isn’t what most people would consider work. Triply more so when someone—in this evening’s case, Sven—isn’t actually working.

Not that Shiro blames his cousin for sprawling out on the couch and watching recaps of recent Winter Olympics happenings on Ryou’s laptop, ostensibly spaced out and effectively oblivious to the rest of the world’s existence. After all, nursing is often both exhausting and thankless, and Sven worked a long shift today. As though that hadn’t been enough, he got back to his and Slav’s place upstairs to find that he’d forgotten his key and his boyfriend wasn’t home yet. Supposedly, the super is going to let Sven into his own apartment soon—but he said so two hours ago and Sven hasn’t yet gotten a call back about it.

“Ayo! What’s the name of your one ex-boyfriend.” Subtle as ever, Sven waves a hand around until he gets everyone’s attention. Pressed for clarification, he rolls his eyes but sits up enough to point at Shiro. “You. Cousin. What’s the name of your one ex-boyfriend? The famous one. Who played your alleged football game?” Pouting, he huffs. “That _is_ what he used to play, right?”

Shiro shrugs. “Yeah, Maurice played American football. For the New England Patriots. Why are you asking?”

“Oh, I dunno, maybe ‘cause I wanna know his name? Exactly like I told you, yah?”

“Maurice Sendak.” Kneading a temple, Shiro tries to focus on the clip he’s editing for Keith. “I have no idea why his parents thought it was funny for him to end up with the same name as the guy who wrote and illustrated _Where The Wild Things Are_. Neither does he. And he _was_ born after the book came out, so…”

Shiro leaves out the part where Maurice was born in 1967, only four years after said book’s release. He’s already aware that one of his ex-boyfriends is old enough to have been his father, if not for the part where Maurice is gay and refreshingly anti-domestic. Having Sven rub his face in that when Shiro hasn’t been Maurice’s boyfriend since 2014, hasn’t seen him in person since before going off to California with Lotor, and hasn’t traded texts since the end of last month? Sounds like one of the last things that Shiro wants to deal with today. Or ever, generally.

In the interests of making Sven shut up, drop the subject, and leave well enough alone, Shiro should definitely stop talking. He should keep his head down, and keep his eyes on the screen, and keep focused on piecing together the different shots of Keith stuffing his face with macaroni. He doesn’t need to engage with his cousin. There’s no shame in letting Sven twist in silence—and yet…

“Still haven’t told me why you’re suddenly taking an avid interest in Maurice, though.”

“Oh, no real reason, I mean?” Sven makes a throaty noise that sounds like a vocal shrug. “It’s just that he’s apparently running around in PyeongChang when he’s not a Winter Olympian or anything? So I thought you maybe might be interested in that?”

“I already know that he’s there, though—”

“Ooooh, yes!” Allura beams at Shiro, apparently quite ready to ignore the essay she’s been working on for her History of Civil Resistance course. “I heard that certain rumors are flying. Something about him possibly deciding to come out—”

“He hasn’t,” Shiro informs her. He doesn’t look up from his computer until Allura huffs at him as if she resents the fact that he’s trying to end this conversation. “Princess, you need to remember: Maurice came of age during the height of the AIDS Crisis. He started coming up when coming out as gay was even more dangerous than it can be now, and more so for a professional athlete. _Especially_ given the bubbling crockpot of toxic masculinity that you get out of his chosen sport. His old manager, the one he had before he found Haxus? That jerk tried to force him to marry some lady supermodel so he’d be less likely to get outed—”

“But isn’t that all the more reason for him to come out _now_? Didn’t that other player from his former team—”

“The fact that Ryan O’Callaghan came out doesn’t mean that Maurice wants to. He doesn’t think that his sexuality is any of the lay-public’s business, and considering how homophobic a lot of football fans can be? Considering how freaking awful a lot of the ‘morality clauses’ that football players deal with are? I don’t blame him for that at all.” Slouching more than he likes, Shiro adds, “Anyway, just because Maurice isn’t _competing_ in PyeongChang doesn’t mean he has no reason to be there.”

“Okay, so why _is_ he there, then—”

“His nephew is one of the US snowboarders, Sven. Yurak’s parents died last year, it’s a miracle he’s even emotionally ready to compete again. Maurice loves him as if he’s his own son, so…” Shiro quirks his shoulders, casually neglects to mention that Yurak was born about a year after Pidge, and tries to return to his video-editing. “He’s there to support one of the only family members he has.”

“One has to wonder why he’s spent so much time around the figure skaters, though—”

“No, Allura. One really, _really_ doesn’t. Because Maurice’s personal life is no one else’s business unless—”

“Because I heard rumors of him having an _affair_.” Her pause is heavy with anticipation. When Shiro looks up at her, she’s grinning as if she needs every ounce of resolve in her tall, toned body to restrain herself from yelling, “With _Johnny Weir_!”

Shiro rolls his eyes. “Did you hear that from the people who write fanfiction about professional figure skaters?”

“Does it entirely matter _where_ I heard it—”

“You’re in _academia_, Princess. If you were writing a paper, would you use suspect sources to make your argument?”

“No. Obviously not. But you must admit, even the most unethical dish and gossip websites are hardly complete in their—”

“Maurice isn’t dating Johnny Weir, okay? They barely even _know_ each other. Anyway, Johnny Weir isn’t his type at all.” Shiro pinches the bridge of his nose, sighs into his palm. “Look, I kinda owe Lotor big-time for various reasons—”

Hunk openly scoffs behind the screen of his own computer.

But since he apparently doesn’t feel like explaining himself, Shiro shakes his head and forges onward: “Lotor’s a figure skating fan. He’s particularly attached to Johnny Weir and Adam Rippon, both because he likes them as performers and because… Well. Y’know, we’re all gay. Anyway, they’re currently in PyeongChang, so I asked Maurice if he had any contacts he could call, or favors he could put in—”

“Literally _why_,” Lance squawks. “Don’t tell me you commissioned your ex to make a sex-tape with them so Lotor could watch it. ‘Cause I love you, Shirito? But that’s pretty freaking _weird_. Even by the present company’s collective standards.”

Swallowing the impulse to roll his eyes, Shiro sulks plaintively at Ryou.

Fortunately, his brother takes pity on him and explains, “Kashi asked Maurice to get their autographs for Lotor, if he didn’t mind.”

“Which he _didn’t_. Because he’s still fond of me, and I told him I’m trying to pay Lotor back for helping—”

“Yeah,” Hunk drawls. “Did you tell him _what_ Lotor helped you with that you’re so flipping excited about? Or did you leave that part out ‘cause you know his stance on it?”

Shiro inhales slowly, deeply, and still feels like putting his fist through a brick wall. “I intimated certain things—”

“Okay, but did you come right out and _say_, ‘Hey, Maurice. Remember all that stuff you took me to while we were together? The stuff about _not_ hating myself for being fat? And _not_ thinking that _**that’s**_ the sole source of my worth as a human being? Well, I went and threw it out a fifty story window, and it crash-landed on some innocent passersby and totally killed them?’” Hunk purses his lips and arches both brows like he’s _daring_ Shiro to question him. “Bet he _loooooved_ that, huh?”

Shiro closes his eyes. He laces his fingers together and focuses on breathing steadily. On _not_ going off at Hunk when he’s a _friend_, and he matters, and he wouldn’t even be angry in the first place if it weren’t for Shiro, so he’s got no right to call Hunk out on anything.

“The last time we talked, I told Maurice a lot of the things that I’ve worked out with Lotor and in therapy.” Wringing his hands doesn’t help Shiro’s nerves, but it gives him an outlet for his restless energy. “I told him that Lotor helped keep me sane while we were in California together—which he _did_. And I told him that Lotor helped me with some difficult health situations, which is _also_ true—”

He holds up a hand as soon as Hunk leans toward him. “And yes, I told Maurice that I lost weight at USC. I told him that it was part of the health problems—which, for the record, it _was_—and I told him that Lotor helped me do it—”

“Then why’d he even say _yes_ to that request? What kind of—”

“He asked if I was healthier, man. I have doctor’s notes that say I am. He asked if I’m _happy_, said that was what mattered most to him, and I said that I _am_.” Tucking his white fringe behind his ear, Shiro makes himself look Hunk in the eye. “Since it was important to me and worked out in a way he feels fine supporting? Maurice agreed to use a favor someone owes him to score a couple autographs for Lotor.”

With which, Shiro turns back to a shot of Keith’s face in profile. He’s throwing his head back, splaying his hair all over their sofa and obviously moaning. God, he’s so beautiful that Shiro could scream himself raw until his throat starts bleeding and then he drops dead from how much he loves Keith—but then again? Maybe the scream is coming from how little Shiro appreciates being made to talk about his one ex-boyfriend who just so happens to be an ex-New England Patriot and a former Super-Bowl MVP.

Unexpectedly discussing Maurice, however, is infinitely preferable to the nonsense that Lance decides to rub Shiro’s face in next.

Granted, anything with Lance usually entails _some_ degree of nonsense. It’s also not entirely unheard of for him to look over Shiro’s shoulder or ask him to pose for a selfie together while they’re nominally working. Even editing Keith’s clips doesn’t scare Lance off because he’s painfully curious about some things, and on a good day, he has the shame of a cat in heat. Why the Hell Lance _cares_ about Keith’s clips, Shiro doesn’t know but also doesn’t want to ask—not least because Lance _would_ answer him and someone would likely take his side.

Seriously, it’s bad enough that Lance has already forced Shiro to explain his scars. It’s bad enough that he didn’t even get to address it for himself because Sven, in all his infinite nursing wisdom, guessed what had happened and blurted it out. Would it kill Lance to let Shiro have more space to work?

After the sixteenth round of catching Lance leaning close to him and peering over his shoulder, Shiro allows himself to sigh. He digs his fingertips at his palm—not that it helps much with recently clipped nails, but it’s a reflex, at this point—and he forces himself to keep breathing evenly. Lance huffs as Shiro compares different shots from his and Keith’s last shoot, of him finally taking Keith’s cock into his mouth… The profile views are nice, but the view from above, from right behind Keith’s shoulder? It might have too much Shiro in it, given that _Keith_ is supposed to be the star—

“Oh. My. _God_,” Lance groans, thumping his forehead on Shiro’s shoulder. “You’re supposed to be making _porn_ with him—”

“Blowing him on camera for an audience’s consumption? Is an absolutely valid form of pornography—”

“Not when you’re looking at him like _that_, it isn’t!”

Lance smacks his face on Shiro’s bicep a few more times. No one says anything, probably joining Shiro in his assumption that Lance isn’t done talking but needs to get this out of his system, first. Whenever he gets himself wound up like this, waiting is about the only thing to do. Trying to _make_ him calm down tends to end in disaster. If not that, then it ends in Lance being obnoxious, which can be even worse than a larger-scale mess, depending on whether or not Lance _wants_ to make things difficult today.

Best way to handle this situation? Sit here quietly, keep poking at the clip, and let Lance bang his face against Shiro’s body until he gets bored or gets everything out.

When he decides he’s done—that he’s ready to use his words and stop acting like he’s two steps off from a freaking temper tantrum—Lance whines and props his chin up on Shiro’s shoulder. “Man, that _hurts_. Why can’t I face-plant on you anymore?”

“We all _know_ why you can’t do that, buddy,” Hunk pipes up. Over the screen of his laptop, he shoots Shiro a glare so brief that Shiro nearly misses it. He snaps back to slouching and staring at his keys before he clarifies, “Muscle doesn’t have the same give to it that fat does. Shiro has a gun show, now. Of _course_ it’s gonna hurt when you beat your face on his arm like this. It’s not that hard to figure out—”

“_Ugh_. It was a _rhetorical_ question, Hunkules. Y’know, like, making conversation—”

“It was a _stupid_ question.” At the sound of Lance whining, Hunk purses his lips. He forces a smile. “I’m just saying? You’re better than playing dumb like that. Everyone knows why you hurt yourself by face-planting on Shiro. No matter what you think on any day or other? You’re kinda, sorta, definitely included in the subset of _everyone_—”

“I was just complaining, okay! It’s not like I was _actually_ asking why Shirito sucks as a human pillow anymore—”

“Then why do we need to rehash it so much?”

“Because maybe I’m still adjusting to him looking like hashtag _‘**#Not.** My. Shiro.’_”

“Why do you keep saying that?” When Lance makes a bemused noise at him, Shiro can’t help slouching and rolling his eyes. “It’s not a hard question, Lance. Ever since I got back, you and Pidge have been going on and on about how I’m _not your Shiro_. Ezor’s getting in on it too, now. I don’t understand, and I want to know _why_.”

Lance gawks at Shiro like he’s proposing that they travel to Los Angeles on a tandem bike, then go swing-dancing in the middle of the 405. Even shaking his head doesn’t bring him around. “Dude, seriously? Why _wouldn’t_ I be saying it?”

Shiro quirks his shoulders. “How about because I’m your _friend_? Or because you love and respect me, even if you don’t like me having abs and miss having an extra human pillow?” God, Shiro shouldn’t say the third thing he’s thinking, but it’s bubbling on his tongue and burning his throat and _Jesus, he shouldn’t say it, but_—“Or, hey, why don’t you lay off this ‘Not My Shiro’ crap already because it’s hypocritical as all get-out and I know that you’re better than this.”

“Uh huh, sure,” Hunk grumbles. “Because you’ve _really_ got room to talk about _that_ right now—”

“Ugh, come _on_, Shirito!” Refusing to let Shiro say anything to Hunk, Lance whines like a six-year-old who _only_ got three slices of cake for his birthday. “There’s nothing _hypocritical_ about it. You didn’t let us in on the process, not even over Instagram or Facebook, so we expected you to come back to us looking more or less the same—”

“Oh, so I offended you by looking like a _human person_ when I got home? As opposed to looking like God spilled a ten-ton bucket of butterscotch pudding and slapped a pair of eyes on it? How is it _wrong_ for me to _hate_ being some enormous, jiggling, beached baby wha—” Shiro flinches, whining as Ryou’s purple stress-ball bounces off his forehead. “_What._”

Ryou shoots a _Pointed Look_ over the tops of his glasses. “You are fat-shaming yourself again—”

“So. _what_,” Shiro bites out before he can stop himself. “It’s not like I’m saying it about anyone who—”

Ryou lobs Lance’s empty Coke can, next. Sighing, Shiro lets it hit him. If he ducked, Ryou would just throw something else, and sooner or later, he’d start running out of objects that can make an impact without hurting Shiro.

“You _are_ saying it about someone who matters, idiot.” He doesn’t miss a beat, catching the stress-ball when Sven throws it back to him. “By the way, trying to say that you don’t matter like this? Is doing the opposite of supporting the claim that you did your therapy work in California.”

_Oh, I still matter to you guys? That’s news to me…_ Shiro meets Ryou’s glare with one of his own, not that it’ll make a difference.

Despite the clamor of thoughts that he’s barely keeping trapped inside his throat and skull, all Shiro allows himself to say is, “Do you want to see the journals I kept for Dr. Hall? All the workbook pages that she made me do? Will _that_ put your mind at ease?”

“You could put my mind at ease by _not fat-shaming yourself_—”

“It’s not like I’m hurting anybody else!”

“Exactly! You _wouldn’t_ say any of these things about anyone else. So why is it acceptable to say them about yourself?”

_Because they were **accurate** about me until I lost weight_, Shiro doesn’t say because it’ll probably make Ryou throw Allura’s stapler.

When Shiro doesn’t give him an actual answer, Ryou sighs. “Fat-shaming yourself retroactively, on the other side of losing half your body weight? Still counts as doing it.” Adjusting his glasses, he turns back to the undergrad essays he’s working through and marking up. “You know better than to verbally abuse yourself like that, Kashi. And you _know_ what I reserve the right to do when I catch you talking about yourself as if your weight made you unlovable or less of a person.”

_Yeah, because throwing stuff at me is really working out **soooooo well** for both of us, **brother**_, Shiro keeps to himself because obviously, no one wants to hear him whine about this. _Because you’re **super**-accomplishing literally anything by making me feel like I can’t even freely talk to—_

“_Anyway_,” Lance crows, eyes wide like he realizes that he accidentally started _Something_—that is, until he decides to pout. “Lighten up, okay, Shirito? Nobody means the _‘Not My Shiro’_ stuff for _real_. It’s all just _jokes_. But you know what I’m five-hundred percent definitely, absolutely _not_ joking about?”

_Your complete disregard for how genuinely uncomfortable I am?_—Shiro wishes he could say that without starting another argument.

“I am _not joking_,” Lance announces with all the gravitas that he can muster, “about the way you’re looking at Mighty Mullet in this clip.”

“_How_ am I looking at Keith, exactly?” Shiro slouches onto his elbows and rubs at the bridge of his nose. “If you’re gonna make accusations like that while I’m editing? I think I deserve to know what you mean.”

“Like you aren’t doing _porn_ with him, that’s for sure!” Sitting up, Lance throws a set of unnecessarily intense sad puppy eyes toward Allura. “_Princess_,” he moans. “Can you come over here and back me up about how Shiro is fucking ridiculous, pretty, pretty please?”

She must want a break or something, because in a flash, Allura’s hovering behind Shiro’s other shoulder. Leaning toward the laptop, she pushes her glasses up her nose and hums pensively. “Well, I acquiesce that Lance is being unhelpfully unspecific about what _he _sees? But, darling, honestly?” She huffs, drapes her arms around Shiro’s shoulders, and rests her chin on top of his head. “You _are_ looking at him… more softly than one sees in most pornography?”

“Well, I didn’t _mean_ to! I thought I was looking at him, like… Y’know, like he was sexy and I wanted to give him the best blow-job—”

“Kashi, I don’t think you’re capable of looking at Keith with anything less than adoration. Probably of the sort that belongs in one of your smutty romance novels.” Massaging his temple, Ryou doesn’t look up from his grading. “I might not agree with my significant others’ points _entirely_? I can’t know for sure, without seeing the video—”

Lance grouses. “You could get over here and take a look for yourself—”

“Not without throwing off my groove. I’m already collecting myself again. If I got up and came to look at Keith and Kashi’s porn? I’d lose the ability to find these students’ arguments through their piles of grammatical errors, botched citations, and—”

“Oh, come on,” Shiro sighs. “I know they get on your nerves? But your students’ essays cannot be that bad.”

“One of them keeps using twisted, Proustian run-on sentences that go on longer than Lotor’s hair. Proust would actually be _preferable_. Because that kind of sentence works out _better_ in French than it does in English. And yet—”

“_Anyway_.” Shiro should probably ease up on the bridge of his nose—but gripping onto it like this makes him feel less tense. Sort of. “I’m not saying that anybody’s wrong right now? Except I don’t see what Allura and Lance think that they’re talking about—”

“You claim not to see the way that Keith’s been pining for you since forever, either.” The way Hunk snaps that point should merit a glare, but he doesn’t give Shiro the satisfaction. “So, sorry not sorry, man? But I’m not really taking _your_ perspective seriously.”

_Yeah. Because that’s so _**_wildly_**_ different from how you’ve been since I got home_, Shiro doesn’t allow himself to say.

He shouldn’t slouch. He shouldn’t let his face fall or let his shoulders droop. He shouldn’t hunch in on himself in any way that might betray the sting Hunk’s words left him with, not where his brother and their friends can see him doing it—but Shiro doesn’t fight himself even half as hard as he ought to. His head follows after his shoulders, hanging toward his keyboard. A quick shake makes his white forelock come loose. If only it would actually act as a shield between Shiro and the others? Then, everything might be halfway decent.

When no one else bothers coming to Shiro’s rescue with an opinion, he tries, “I _honestly_ have no idea what you’re talking about—”

“Oh, I _know_ you damn sure _think_ that. It’s part of what makes this so completely _stupid_.”

If Hunk is gonna scold him like this—even over things that are only marginally his business because they live together—Shiro probably owes him eye contact. But on the other hand, his voice is so steely that Shiro would rather disappear into the floor. Not that reality is going to do him the kindness of giving him that sort of escape, but why would it?

Only one thing to do. Namely: let Hunk speak his piece and take it like an adult.

With only silence out of Shiro, though, Hunk groans. “Look, I get it, man. I get being the big guy, and feeling like the ugly duckling, and hearing all kinds of crap that makes you think you aren’t hot enough to land any boyfriend, never mind the one you’re crushing on—”

“Which is _dumb_,” Lance chimes in, slapping Shiro’s knee. It’s a bit like when Blue and Cova slap at sunbeams or the red dots from Ryou’s laser pointer. “It’s _dumb_ because Keith was mooning over you _before_ you went all Calvin Klein model, _GQ _cover-boy on everybody. Like anybody even _wanted_ you to do that—”

“I _know_ you didn’t want that for me. You’ve made that _abundantly_ clear.” Shiro’s cheeks heat up as he lets his eyes slip shut. Not that anyone _cares_ because why would they. As far as they’re concerned, this is probably his due comeuppance for losing weight, and making a choice without getting their signed and notarized pre-approval in triplicate, because obviously, he should’ve known better than to question his position in The Gang—“How very _dare_ I do something for _myself_, right?”

“If you really did it for yourself, I’d be with you, sure.” Lance throws himself up. His chair scrapes along the floor and before Shiro can decide to look at him or not, Lance’s bare, skinny legs are draped across his lap. “But y’know what I see in all of this? You trying to pull some godawful, nineties rom-com makeover garbage—”

“Yeah, because Lotor _really_ would’ve helped me out, if he thought that’s what it was—”

“I don’t know what goes on in Lotor’s mind, okay! But in between rounds of gushing about Hunk, I figure he’s probably the sort of weirdo who’d go along with some stupid rom-com plan _because_ it’s a stupid rom-com plan and he’d find it totally adorable or whatever.”

“The only rom-coms he loves that much are _Harold and Maude_, _Funny Face_ with Audrey Hepburn, _Ten Things I Hate About You_, _But I’m A Cheerleader_, and _Shaun of the Dead_. And he thinks makeover plots are stupid.” Hunk squeaks, and when Shiro looks up again, he’s blushing scarlet. “Also, Shiro’s right. Lotor didn’t help him out. Not like you’re saying he would have, I mean.”

“Okay, but how do you know? Were you _there_—”

“Lotor wouldn’t have helped Kashi with some asinine makeover plot, babe.” Ryou sighs without looking up from his papers. “I grilled him about it as soon as I heard what was going on. Besides, his idea of a makeover features someone’s weight going in the _opposite_ direction—”

“Not that he’s doing _anything_ like that right now.” Shiro glances at Hunk, hoping for… he doesn’t even know what. Some kind of sign that he isn’t letting Ryou get to him, maybe. But all Hunk does is shrug and turn back to his work—looking like he can’t possibly be bothered with anything that Shiro could tell him—which makes Shiro fight himself on whether to wince or not. “I’m just saying: Lotor’s interested in more than his pet kinks, and as far as _you’re_ concerned—”

“I don’t need you to play Cyrano for us, Shiro. Neither does he—”

“I’m _not_ playing Cyrano. All I’m trying to do is say that Lotor has had Hanahaki for you often enough that—”

“Well, _I’m _trying to tell you that it’s not your business in this situation—”

“And _I’m _trying to tell freaking _everybody_—” Smacking the table, Lance cuts himself off. “Whatever the situation was _really_ like in California, I think it’s totally quiznakking _ridiculous _that we aren’t talking about the elephant on the sofa—”

“Yoo-hoo!” Over by the sofa, a hand jolts up and flaps around with no direction. “I can hear you—”

“Not _you_, Sven.” Ryou pushes his glasses up with a heavy sigh. “Lance is just… having a colorful use of language again. And refusing to be pinned down by the everyday rules and regulations of figurative speech that we all take for granted—”

“And I’d never call you an elephant, anyway.” For the first time since Shiro got here, Lance’s smile softens into something genuine. Something fond. Something warm and so close to how Lance behaves when he’s at his best. Something, it seems, that Shiro does not deserve to see right now. Flipping his bangs back off his forehead, Lance adds, “You’re more like a Japanese-Norwegian flamingo. Or like one of those Youtube cats that falls off a piano, lands on a dog, and then acts like they meant to do that.”

Grunting quietly, Sven props himself up on his elbows. He blinks at Lance as if he can’t puzzle out what’s being said, much less how he should respond to it. There isn’t any judgment in his expression—none that Shiro can make out, at any rate, and Sven usually doesn’t judge as often as Shiro and Ryou do—but all the same, Sven looks more than a little befuddled.

Ryou takes pity on him, explaining, “He’s complimenting you. Please, just go with it.”

“Well, thank you? I think?” Yawning, he lets his head loll back. With a soft, grumbling sound, still looking at the ceiling, Sven _could_ let things go—but instead, he decides to say, “I don’t think it’s fair to be calling _Kashi _any sort of elephant, either. Not before California, _definitely_ not after—”

“I rather doubt that Lance meant that term literally,” Allura points out, sighing back into her own seat and putting her legs in Ryou’s lap. “And if he meant it to apply to Shiro, then _Ryou_ would have a few choice words for him—”

“I have a point to this, Your Highness—”

“You don’t need to address me like that. You _know_ that I am not a_ literal_ Princess—”

“Well, _I know_ that I wanna hear what Sven thinks I was saying, if he’s gonna interrupt—”

“You _were _paused when he decided to cut in, _sogekishu_—”

“Brother, I’m with Lance. Sven should’ve kept his mouth to himself until Lance was done—”

“Kashi, please. You’re not _really_ with Lance. You only want to encourage him in the hopes that he’ll drop what he wanted to talk about before—”

“Which I do _not_ intend to do, not that anybody _cares_—”

“Well, what if _you’re_ only with Lance because you and Allura are _dating_ him—”

“If I may interject? I think that both of you have fair points and valid interpretations of the situation. However, you cannot speak for Lance’s motivations when, obviously, neither of you is Lance—”

“Yes, Princess! Thank you! Neither of the amazing Shirogane twins is _me_—”

“Ugh, guys, can we _stop it_ with the freaking _fighting_?” Looking more than a bit green around the gills, Hunk scrubs at his temples with both hands. “I seriously feel like I’m gonna barf—”

“Buddy, I love you, but you _always_ feel like you’re gonna barf when things get interesting.” Lance rolls his eyes, but rather than fixing them on Hunk, he stares at Sven. “You were _saying_? About elephants or whatever you thought that I was on about?”

Sven quirks his shoulders and makes the most noncommittal noise that Shiro has ever heard from his cousin. “Well, now I want to know what you thought that you were on about. ‘cause I know what I was going to be on about, but if we’re on about different things entirely—”

“What _I’m _on about is how there’s an obvious point that we’ve been ignoring since Shiro and Lotor got back from California. It’s _stupid_ that we’re ignoring this, and it isn’t helping _anybody_, and I’m more than frankly sick of that.”

Pursing his lips and narrowing his eyes, Lance briefly seems like he _realizes_ that this isn’t exactly the turn of phrase he wanted. But with a shake of the head, he bats at Shiro’s shoulder and instructs him to sit up. When Shiro complies, Lance doesn’t let him hug himself or fold his arms over his chest. He grabs one of Shiro’s wrists and tugs his arm down, then arches both eyebrows at Shiro until he lowers the other one on his own. Whatever Lance thinks he’s doing with this, the only way to get it over quickly and without feeling like a total heel? Is cooperating and letting Lance have his moment.

If only Shiro could do that _without_ the tension that’s knotting up inside his chest. He doesn’t feel any better about the way that Lance waves a hand around his torso, acting like a used car salesman or a a peddler of snake oil cures for everything from stage-four cancer to stubbed toes to broken hearts and unrequited love. Or like an easily excited loudmouth who’s grating Shiro’s last gay nerve like one of Hunk’s finely aged cheeses, such as the case is, currently.

As he waits for Lance to start making whatever case he thinks he has, Shiro closes his eyes and leans his head back. He rubs hard at the bridge of his nose, as if this can keep him grounded enough to avoid letting his more unseemly emotions take control. Patience might yield focus, but right now, Shiro will settle for getting through this and _not_ losing his head.

“So,” Lance says with far more gravity than this situation calls for. “We all _know_ that Shiro came back from film school with abs like an underwear model—”

“I came back with the abs of someone who _eats right_ and _works his core_—”

Lance shoves his hand in front of Shiro’s face. He snaps his fingers and thumb together like he’s doing a shadow-puppet of a duck—but glares at Shiro by way of telling him to shut his mouth. “We have all seen his body, we’re getting used to it, and we’ve all heard what kinds of stories he and Lotor have been telling everybody about why Shiro did this to himself—”

“Yes. Stories. Right.” Shiro doesn’t roll his eyes, but he allows himself to deadpan, “Of course, we completely fabricated my rationale for changing my diet and going to the gym. _Obviously_. That’s why Keith and Ryou have been telling you the _exact. same. thing_—”

“Keith would repeat any lie you asked him to, genius. Don’t act like you don’t know that—”

“Considering Keith’s personal integrity? I’m compelled to disagree—and to defend him when he’s not here to do it himself—”

“Miss me with your _blah blah blah blah_ about Keith’s _personal integrity_, okay—”

“_Kashi_,” Ryou groans. “Please just let Lance talk. We’re never going to get anywhere if you two keep contradicting each other.”

“Thanks, _bonito_.”

“Any time, Sharpshooter. But the flip-side for you, is…” Over the tops of his glasses, Ryou shoots a pointed glance toward his boyfriend. “I realize your Adderall might be wearing off, or getting there? But can you please _try_ to get to the point? Kashi’s getting fussy, and Sven’s had a long day, and like Hunk sort of said? We’d all like to hear your point instead of squabbling.”

Lance beams at Ryou, looking like his heart is full to bursting with genuine, requited love. But he soon slips back into his rigid expression, the one that’s trying too hard and demands to be taken seriously. In most other situations, Shiro _would_ take Lance’s side about that matter. He _does_ believe that more people ought to take Lance seriously, and that it’s unfair for people to write Lance off as completely frivolous or stupid just because he has a sense of humor. Or because he enjoys taking care of his skin. Or because he isn’t as obviously book-smart as his significant others and his intelligence generally manifests in other ways.

At the moment, however, Shiro wishes that agreeing didn’t mean tacitly consenting to letting Lance make a sideshow freak out of him.

“My point,” Lance says before he can let Shiro stew for too long, “is that we’re all taking it for granted that Shiro _wasn’t _trying to pull some kind of rom-com makeover plot on himself. We can all _see_ that he looks like hashtag ‘Not My Shiro’—but we’re all also assuming that he lost weight and got abs for reasons _other _than feeling unattractive—”

_Which I _**_was_**_, thank you, _Shiro doesn’t let himself say but only because he doesn’t want to cause his friends, his cousin, and Ryou any further stress by interjecting or talking over Lance again. Not that it keeps him from dwelling on this in silence: _Why can’t we all take for granted the idea that my feelings about my own body and appearance matter? Why can’t we try that out, just _**_once_**_?_

“And, y’know, I want to believe in Shiro about that, too? I want to believe that he’s not letting this turn into a _thing_, or sitting around and moping about feeling like he’s too ugly to get a boyfriend, or whatever other things we don’t want him feeling like. I even think he _probably_ deserves our benefit of the doubt on that because—okay? To be completely _fair_? I haven’t _seen_ any indication that he’s _overly_ fixated on looking hot. Aside from him putting up selfies on Instagram more often, but I heard from Allura, who heard from Keith, who heard from Shiro? That he was _supposed_ to be doing that with his selfies _beforehand_, too—”

Hunk groans. “How is this getting to the _point_, exactly?”

Throwing up his arms in mock-surrender could mean Lance is close to giving up, if not for Lance splaying his fingers into jazz hands. That smirk has too much of an edge, and there’s too much glimmer behind Lance’s eyes. He’s up to _something_, he has to be. If the next words out of his mouth involve any permutation of _razzle dazzle_, then Shiro’s going to—

“Why are we ignoring the obvious point that he _still_ doesn’t get—”

“_What_ don’t I get, already—”

“You _still_ refuse to see how Keith made heart-eyes at you when you were fat!” Glowering, Lance folds his arms over his chest and slumps in his seat. His foot clatters into Shiro’s ankle as he lets his legs sprawl every which way they please. “You don’t think he’s making them at you _now_. You didn’t think he was making them at you _before_. You don’t think it was _possible_ for him to be making heart-eyes at you when you had a gut and thighs and everything, even though he absolutely _was_, okay, and it was totally _obnoxious _for the rest of us—”

“What does _that_ have to do with _anything_?” Shiro wishes he could hug himself without mirroring Lance right now. In lieu of that, he digs his fingertips into his knee and hopes that he isn’t glaring at his friend too hard. “Do you want me to say that I was _hideous _before I lost the weight—”

“Which you _weren’t_—”

“Are you trying to push me into saying I didn’t think that anyone would look at me like they really _wanted _me, _especially_ not Keith—”

“Which was obviously _garbage_, because he’s been looking at you like that since _forever_—”

“Or what about admitting that part of me didn’t even _want_ guys to look at me like they wanted to be with me? Because if they ever did, then either they’d turn out to be jerking me around, or they _wouldn’t _be and I would hold them back—”

“How would dating you hold _anybody_ back—”

“I mean, it’s not like they could’ve taken me out on dates to anywhere nice—”

“Lotor’s taking Hunk to crash some fancy party uptown this weekend, isn’t he? Why couldn’t you have—”

“I was _bigger_ than Hunk. By about a hundred pounds, actually. Not to mention? I was _fatter_ than Hunk. Not in terms of weight, in terms of _body composition_. Do you _not realize_ that Hunk is actually reasonably fit and muscular—”

Throwing up his hands, Lance groans. “I realize that you’re making up a fuck-ton of excuses because you don’t want to deal with my actual question.”

“I still don’t know what your _actual question_ is.”

“Why don’t you just tell Keith that you’re in love with him already!”

That sends a chill straight down to the pit of Shiro’s stomach. His lungs quiver, trembling like they might decide to start coughing and out his Hanahaki to somebody other than Lotor. Last thing he needs right now, so Shiro steels himself. Takes slow, deep breaths and tries not to go off on Lance. He’s only trying to help. He’s only asking things that he sees as particularly relevant, making points that he thinks of as important. He’s only glaring so hard at Shiro because he feels like he isn’t being listened to, or taken seriously, or otherwise properly acknowledged by one of his so-called friends.

As he slumps in his seat, Lance’s expression only softens somewhat. “Come _on_, man. Shirito, you… You don’t look at Keith like someone who’s only doing porn with a costar. And he looks at you like you’re literally everything to him. It’s obvious that he’s in love with you—”

“Not to me, it isn’t—”

“Well, why _not_—”

“Oh, hey, now!” Once again, Sven’s hand jumps up into the air. He waves it at the rest of them like the guy in a lecture who needs to make sure that all of his classmates know that he has an opinion about absolutely everything, trilling _yoohoo, me! _until he has everybody paying attention to him. “I’m with Lance about that question being a fair and valid one—”

“There, see? Fair and valid. My question is completely—”

“But what I wanna _really _know is…” Sighing, Sven drags himself into sitting up. He blinks at Shiro without a single shred of guile. As if he doesn’t know a damn thing about what he’s going to ask. “Keith’s not exactly been _quiet_ about the kinda clips that he’s been making. And if he’s really making those videos—the ones with the feeding and the thing about him gaining weight—and if you’re making faces like Lance says you are—”

“Oh, he _is_,” Hunk and Allura say in unison, then briefly arch an eyebrow at each other.

Allura huffs, shaking out her billowing cloud of a ponytail. “As per his usual, dear Shiro has a particular way of looking at Keith that—”

“Like there’s literally nothing else in the entire universe worth looking at.” Hunk rolls his eyes. “Like, there’s a reason why the people on Keith’s message boards haven’t seen these idiots staring at each other in real life but still think that they’re dating—”

_Right_, Shiro doesn’t allow himself to say. _Because you can seriously accuse us of staring at each other like that without understanding why other people might come to the same conclusions that you have. Because that’s fair, and that makes sense—_

Without even noticing the way that Shiro rolls his eyes, Hunk goes on like nothing can stop him: “I mean, Sven. Buddy, you thought that I was only gonna win a bet with Pidge about whether or not Shiro would find a boyfriend in California? She paid me double because not only did he _not_ find a boyfriend—but his way of looking at Keith got about fifty times worse.”

Stomach turning as if he might go from zero to projectile vomiting faster than Hunk on a bad day at Six Flags, Shiro frowns. His lips press together so tightly that they almost disappear. “You guys were _betting_ on whether or not anyone in California would ever want to date me?”

“No, man, on whether or not _you_ would want to date anybody else but Keith—”

“I’ve had plenty of exes who weren’t Keith. I mean, Lotor, Maurice, and Adam from high school? They were my only real _boyfriends_, but—”

“But you weren’t seeing _anybody_ when you left. And, and, and, I mean? With the way you look at Keith—”

“You mean with my _eyes_?”

“No, come on, you _know_ how you look at him. And how _he_ looks at _you_—”

Sven raises his hand again, and again, he waves it around so frantically, it’s a miracle that he keeps his arm attached. “That’s not my notion that I’m asking after, actually!” He pauses as if anticipating somebody’s interruption and sighs when it never comes. Pushing his floppy bangs off his forehead, Sven turns his arched eyebrows around the entire group, silently pushing them to speak now or forever hold their piece.

When everyone stays quiet—the biggest reaction is Lance shrugging in silence—Sven turns his gaze exclusively onto Shiro. “It’s not like Keith can _hide_ the way he’s put on weight anymore. It isn’t like he even wants to. On the contrary, he is perfectly open about embracing his increasing body fat percentage and enjoying the process of accumulating said fat. And that confidence is part of what his subscribers love so much about his videos—”

“Oh, _now_ who’s stalling about getting to the point already. Why is it that, whenever I do anything, it’s _wro_—”

Sven holds up a hand as if that can stop Lance—and miraculously, Lance falls silent.

As though this entire interruption didn’t happen, Sven wrinkles his nose at Shiro and says, “I don’t understand how you can hate your own body so much—the one you _used_ to have, I mean—”

“He doesn’t have a new body, Sven.” Ryou pinches the bridge of his nose. “He changed his old body in a way that _looks_ different—”

“How could you have hated your own extra weight so much, but love the fact that _Keith_ is getting fat?” The way that Sven looks at him now gives Shiro the distinct feeling that it’s a sunny day in the middle of August, he is an ant on the sidewalk, and his cousin is holding a magnifying glass above him. “I’m not _judging_, I only want to understand. It would stand to reason, if you ask me, that being so entranced by _Keith’s _weight gain—and still being quite enamored with him, too—would mean that you could’ve accepted your own body—”

“Uh, it’s called _acting_?” Shiro could gape right now, but that might give everyone else some smug satisfaction that they absolutely don’t deserve. “Keith and I are playing _characters_ in these videos. We aren’t doing anything as ourselves. We’re doing it as Akira and Sable, okay?” Shiro shakes his head, glares at his white forelock when it tumbles loose. But with a huff, he informs Sven and everyone, “Nothing in those videos is _real_. You understand that, right?”

“Oh, come _on_,” Lance crows. “Do you _seriously_ think we’re fucking _stupid_?”

Shiro shakes his head at that—which, unfortunately, makes Lance groan at him even louder.

Waving at the piece of video currently on the screen, Lance huffs. “You make that face at Keith _all the quiznakking time_, dude. You make it at him when you’re nowhere near a camera. You make at him when you think he isn’t looking—”

“Which he usually _isn’t_.” Hunk grimaces. “I mean, the idiocy here goes both ways—”

“Okay, so I maybe look at him in a special way, but…” Shiro’s mouth skids to a halt as it catches up with his brain. So help him, he needs to stick this landing. He has no idea how he’s going to do this, having dug himself in so far—but he takes a deep breath and lets his mouth have its way: “I only look at him like that—it’s not about his _weight_ or anything, okay? I couldn’t care less about that. My face is just because it’s _Keith_—”

“Oh, bull_shit_, brother!” Ryou looks up from his stack of papers, giving Shiro one of the most unimpressed expressions that he’s ever seen. It’s gotta be top five, at least. “Maybe that’s what you’ve been telling yourself, but if you really think—”

“I have _no idea_ what you think you’re talking about!”

This is a lie. In truth, Shiro is very certain about what Ryou wants to say. Of everyone in this room, Ryou is the only one who knows about the sorts of shameful things that Shiro’s into. Not that the others might not have _ideas_ about his no doubt freakish bedroom interests—but Ryou is the only one who _knows for sure_. At all costs, Shiro _needs_ to keep his brother from revealing anything potentially embarrassing. Potentially _unseemly_.

Pushing his glasses up, Ryou sighs the sigh of someone who doesn’t have the time to deal with this shit but simply cannot let it go. Which, in turn, makes Shiro swallow thickly. His lungs curl up around themselves as though they’re withering. As if they’re shriveling up inside of him because everything has gotten to be too much. There’s a glint in Ryou’s eyes like the edge of a knife, and usually, he saves that kind of expression for people _other_ than Shiro. The only time that he’s turned it on his brother was back in high school, after that disastrous winter formal, when Shiro didn’t want to tell Ojiisan about what had happened—

Forcing himself to look Ryou in the eye, Shiro keeps his voice low. “Whatever you want to say about this… Can it _wait_?”

Ryou does not grimace at Shiro—but he tilts his head so that the lights glare off his glasses, which is just as bad.

Shiro can’t let himself waver. _Won’t_ let himself drop eye contact with Ryou. Especially not as he whispers, “_Please_?”

At least this makes Ryou soften. His face falls and his shoulders droop. Without a word, he gives Shiro a short, quick nod. So, he understands. He’ll want to talk about it later, because of course he will—but for now, Ryou understands and is agreeing to back off about that particular matter. Agreeing _not_ to out Shiro’s kinks to their friends and cousin.

Allura, on the other hand, scrunches up her face with a curiosity that just won’t quit. “If I may? You _have_ watched Keith rather… _intently_ during meals—”

Shiro swallows thickly and part of him wishes he would choke. Uncertain of what he’s going to say but knowing that it must be something, he stares down at the table. He can’t let his friends dig any deeper about this. He can’t risk them finding out the truth that they’re unwittingly ferreting after. He opens his mouth, ready to let it take charge and hopefully rescue him—

And that’s when his phone goes off, _ding!_-ing with a text message from Keith.

As ever, Keith is simple and straightforward: _[Clip idea came up. Where are you?]_

Shiro fires back: _[Up at Ryou’s. But I can leave whenever I want. Which I’m on the fence about.]_

For all leaving abruptly feels like it might be rude, Keith’s next text makes the decision for Shiro: _[I want you here for this. Please come?]_

If anyone has anything else to say, they stay quiet—until Shiro closes his laptop, which makes Allura and Sven start protesting about how they didn’t mean harm with anything they’ve said. Nudging himself free of Lance’s legs, letting them fall wherever gravity takes them, Shiro packs up his things. He stretches as he shoves himself up, barely taking in the confusion from Ryou and Lance, or the grim resignation from Hunk.

This is likely where Shiro should say something witty and reassuring about what they’ve discussed, and his role in it, and whatever all they think they have reason to worry about.

Yet, as he heads for the door, all he can come up with is, “Keith needs me. See you guys later.”


	14. Chapter 14

Taking the stairs down from Ryou’s should help Shiro clear his head. Get the blood pumping, get him out of his discomfort with everything that his friends decided to rub his face in. No matter how well they thought they meant, none of that conversation helped with _anything_— but of course, why would anybody consider Shiro’s opinion on what’s helpful for him or not?

_Anybody but Keith and Lotor_, he thinks ruefully. Because it’s true, they’ve legitimately been doing their best.

It’s probably some kind of indication of what a heel Shiro is, the fact that he didn’t think of this qualification at first and passively lumped Keith and Lotor in with the rest of their friends. If nothing else, it’s a sign that he isn’t giving them his best, which is what they deserve from him—and that thought only makes Shiro’s heart clang harder and harder against the cage he’s tried to lock it in.

Why won’t these asinine ideas _leave him alone _already?

So wrapped up in his own thoughts and trying to rid himself of them, Shiro stomps right past his, Keith, and Hunk’s floor. He lets himself huff all the way to the basement. Even this isn’t enough, though, so Shiro goes to the end of the hall. Moving as if on autopilot, he goes straight past the place where their building’s laundry facility lurks, past the grungy lounge area that’s straight out of a university student center, and past the boiler room, straight to the vending machines.

Moving around so much should be blowing _off_ steam for Shiro, not making things build up inside of him. _Not_ making him rock up onto the balls of his feet as he sulks at the slim pickings of snacks behind the glass—all of which are, unfortunately, very high up his list of old favorite indulgences that he cannot afford to eat, not anymore.

Staring at them now, Shiro inhales sharply. Heatedly. He refuses to close his eyes or flinch. No one else is around right now and his reflection won’t judge him any for those signs of weakness—but Shiro would judge himself, which is equally awful (and arguably worse). Balling his hand into a fist, setting his jaw, Shiro can’t shake off everything that comes rushing back to him, as clear as if it’s happening right here, right now. The thought of how many times he ever came down here to mope in relative privacy, then wound up blowing at least ten dollars, if not upwards of twenty, on treats that he didn’t need and shouldn’t have been eating, no matter how many times his friends and brother swore that he deserved to take it easy and eat what he wanted…

The thought of how often he said that he was on a diet, that he was going to get his act together and really lose the weight, this time, and sometimes even lasted for a couple weeks with his reducing, maybe even managed to shave off a couple pounds and start feeling better about himself, feeling like he was finally getting things right after all of his previous failures, feeling like he had it in him to learn some necessary discipline and self-control—only to inevitably break, and crumble, and find his way down here, shoving crumpled bills and dirty coins into this machine, tearing into bags of chips, sometimes crying when the junk food passed his lips…

The thought of how many calories Shiro ever stuffed into his fat, disgusting, weak-willed face—

Narrowing his eyes at a row of relatively untouched strawberry Kit-Kats, Shiro hisses. “Don’t think for a second that I’m not onto you.”

The candy bars don’t respond. For a moment, Shiro wonders why he would expect them to say anything. They’re inanimate objects, not high-calorie, sugar-laden boogeymen, artificially flavored to mimic a pale imitation of Shiro’s favorite fruit.

Even so—even knowing that he’s standing around the basement and talking to single-serving candies like some kind of crazy person—Shiro frowns at them. “You’re not going to beat me. Not this time. Not anymore. You. Have. No. Power. Over. Me.”

In the face of the Kit-Kats’ insistent, stony silence—never mind their complete lack of appreciation for his _Labyrinth_ reference—Shiro allows himself to sigh. It comes out with a heavier sound than he likes, as if the flower petals he still hasn’t cleared out of his lungs make it that much harder to heave a breath out of himself. His stomach turns and he folds his arms over his chest as if it might protect him from the bags of Cheetos and the Snickers bars, from the siren call of junk food.

It doesn’t, not really—but fortunately, remembering all his former trips down here makes him feel like he could throw up. Which is a perfectly good a reason not to eat anything. Not even his _friends_ could argue with that, with Shiro refusing to eat any of this garbage because he doesn’t want to give himself the last push that could make him vomit.

In turn, that helps ground him back in the moment. Realistically, there is no conspiracy here. In all likelihood, the vending machines haven’t been refilled for a while, and it’s mere chance that spearmint Lifesavers, some suspicious-looking bubblegum, and Shiro’s old favorite treats are all that’s left. Sometimes, there isn’t any deeper significance to the things that Shiro confronts. Sometimes, they’re only random encounters that mean nothing more or less than whatever significance Shiro chooses to give them.

He has control over this moment. He has control over himself, his choices. He doesn’t need to surrender.

Instead of glaring at the indulgent trash food, Shiro sneers at his dim reflection as though this might drive home his point about how the choice is his and he needs to make it properly. He’d do so much better with a real mirror—but he can make out enough of his face to feel like he’s staring at someone else. Shiro’s heart sinks, twists around the inside of his chest. He grips onto his own elbow for dear life, clinging to the pain as a way to keep from disappearing up his own thoughts. If he can’t cut them off, then he can at least keep himself reined in.

Still, the guy blinking back at him… Shiro _knows_ him—he’s seen this guy’s face in every other reflective surface that he’s seen lately, and in the selfies that Lotor and Keith keep making him put up on his Instagram—but something about this doesn’t feel _right_. His cheekbones are so defined, so sharp, which makes sense enough except that Shiro _can’t_ have cheekbones like that because why would he. Why would dieting and working himself sick at the gym do anything to fix him or change the way he looks.

Without any obvious answers presenting themselves to him, Shiro sucks in his stomach, looking desperately at the reflection. _Hoping_ for some kind of confirmation that he isn’t going out of his mind. But that image doesn’t turn back into an enormous belly, bulging with flab despite Shiro’s attempts at hiding it. The fabric of his t-shirt hangs there more loosely, no longer brushing so close to his middle. When Shiro pulls it up and reveals his torso—not like anybody’s here to see him doing this, so why shouldn’t he—he finds a firm, tight set of abs. The only reason why he knows he still has fat on his body is that he can _feel_ it, even if he can’t see any of it clearly, right now, in this moment.

Dropping his shirt, Shiro meets his reflection’s eye and swallows thickly. “_Don’t _do this,” he whispers to himself, voice firm and cold, despite Shiro having no idea which specific _this_ he means, exactly. “You know so much better. _We_ have become _so. much. better_ than this—”

Before he can rip himself as many new ones as he deserves, his phone goes off again. Another text from Keith: _[Tell Lance that I’ll come fight to rescue you if he doesn’t let you come down here already.]_

_[He’s fine. I’m on my way. Be right there.]_

Sighing softly, Shiro glances at his reflection one last time—and his head spins as he recognizes what he’s feeling. _Pity_— as if there’s any reason why _anyone_ should pity Shiro anymore.

Before he lost the weight, alright. He didn’t _like _it, but he _understood_ why people pitied him, back then. He wasn’t strong enough to be secure in himself as he was, like Keith is getting and like Hunk has _always_ been. He _knows_ that it wasn’t about his looks, the weight loss—not entirely, not the way that most of his friends want to think it was—but the deeper insecurity couldn’t have been fixed when he was that big, either.

Anymore, though, there’s no reason for pity. No reason for fear. No reason for worry and no reason for any insecurity, regardless of how much Shiro’s idiot brain has decided to disagree with him about that. Most importantly, though? There’s no reason for Shiro to stay down here, torturing himself in ways that he doesn’t even fully understand. Pocketing his phone, Shiro skulks out, past the elevators and toward the stairwell.

By the time he makes it home, he’s ready to put his fist through the freaking drywall. Except not really, because he _can’t_ do something like that. He can’t because punching a wall would call even more problems down on his head than he’s already done. Best case scenario, he _only_ messes up his own hand and, in so doing, probably makes it so he can’t get his lifts in at the gym tomorrow.

Not getting his lifts in would mean that he’d need to compensate with something less intensive on his hands, maybe add an extra cardio day. It wouldn’t be the end of the world—but too much complacency could lead Shiro to lose the tone and muscle that he’s so painstakingly carved out for himself. He could end up setting himself back because _one_ missed day could turn into _two_ missed days, which could all too easily become a pattern of self-neglect, exactly like Shiro used to have.

Storming through the apartment like a human hurricane, he drops his old backpack by the coffee-table. God, he needs to calm down. He can’t go into shooting a clip with Keith when he feels this way—or, well, he _could_, but Keith deserves so much better than that from Shiro, his best friend and the one person he’s ever trusted to get on camera with him. Shiro needs to get himself together. His deep breaths feel like they’re helping, like they’re steadying his nerves enough for him to pretend to be a functional adult human.

Until he doesn’t find Keith waiting in his bedroom. For the life of him, Shiro can’t help groaning at this absence.

At least Keith got things ready. The cameras are all set up—three on their tripods and sitting around the bed, with _two_ hanging up and duct-taped to Keith’s headboard, this time. Over on the desk, the mics and the recorders wait out in the open. A pair of Keith’s old jeans sit on the comforter, uncertain whether they want to be balled up or sprawling out all over everything.

Shiro recognizes said jeans without Keith even needing to put them on. They’re black, slim-cut, perfect for shoving into his favorite boots. One of the knees has been worn down to a hole, thanks to him wearing them so often in the past few years. Before he tilts his head back and takes in a view of the ceiling, Shiro notices that the fabric inside the thighs seems a bit lighter-colored than the rest. Chub-rub, then—Shiro’s old nemesis and the ruiner of so many pairs of pants, there’s no mistaking it. If he wanted to get closer, he’d surely find the telltale balls of thread, formed through the repeated motion of chunky thighs bumping against each other.

Moreover, Shiro recognizes these jeans because of their backstory. He got them as a gift for Keith, back at Christmas 2016. He bought them a size up from Keith’s (now-former) usual because the manufacturer said that they tended to run too small—and then Keith complained a bit about how he liked them but felt like they were in perpetual danger of falling off his ass. In the few shots of them that wound up on Keith’s Instagram, that looked like he was exaggerating. Sure, the jeans seemed a _bit_ loose, but Shiro’s own jeans at the time _had_ been falling off of him. He hadn’t replaced his wardrobe since they’d gotten out to California, despite Lotor nagging him about how ridiculous he looked, wearing old clothes like this.

Still, Shiro had held out. Before California, he’d refuse to size up, believing that he’d get himself together and slim down until he’d put on even more weight literally nothing fit him. He used to hold on until the last possible moment, until he could no longer deny that he’d failed at yet another diet and let himself get even fatter. Even bigger and even more disgusting.

During his efforts at losing weight, though, Shiro refused to size down until he either hit an important milestone or circumstances made new clothes absolutely necessary. There wasn’t a point in restocking his closet so often when he had more weight to lose. Around his and Ryou’s twenty-seventh birthday, he hadn’t gotten new things since he’d first gotten his weight down to three-ninety-five and found that building up muscle was making him shave off inches faster than he’d planned. Even so, he meant to hold out on shopping for another twenty pounds. He wanted to wait until he was back under three-hundred pounds for the first time since he was about fifteen. Getting a new wardrobe seemed like a decent way to celebrate that milestone.

Ultimately, Shiro only compromised on that because Lotor had been right about one thing. Naoko and Satomi would’ve found such a significant weight loss even more perturbing if he’d shown up to his birthday dinner in the outfit that he planned to wear. He was swimming in a black button-up that had become too large for him, and according to Lotor, it made him look like he was deliberately trying to keep people from seeing how his body looked. _“Your aunts will be shocked enough as is by your transformation, darling. Please do not hand them any further reason for concern.”_

Keith, these days, must be another sort of animal entirely. He’s probably avoiding the issue of new clothes, putting it off for as long as he possibly can, because he enjoys the way that his old ones fit him so tightly now. Because he thinks that he looks devastatingly beautiful, crammed into t-shirts that always ride up on him and jeans that threaten to rip their seams if he moves the wrong way—and he’s right about that. Keith pulls off his extra weight like Shiro never could’ve hoped to do with his own. His full hips and plump thighs are so delectable, so perfect. Letting his eyes slip shut, Shiro thinks of the way that Keith’s legs rub up against each other as he walks, the way this makes his hips wiggle…

Then, a hand finds his shoulder and Shiro gasps.

He only doesn’t jump away because it’s Keith, squinting up at him as if Shiro’s gone from human person to wall of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Keith doesn’t hold that expression long, though. While Shiro catches his breath, Keith’s whole face softens up until Shiro would almost dare to call that look adoring. If not for the obvious concern, the worry that Keith doesn’t even attempt to hide? Then, _maybe_ Shiro would let himself entertain any wild ideas about Keith’s face betraying _adoration_. Affection, surely, that makes sense enough. Even if Keith has never and will never love Shiro back in the same way that he does, they _do_ love each other in some fashion. Affection has been part of their relationship for as long as they’ve been friends.

Adoration, though? That sounds like a fairy tale and then some.

Squeezing Shiro’s shoulder, Keith sighs. “Whose tires do I need to slash?”

“Nobody’s. Why would I ever tell you to—”

“Alternately: what did Lance do _this_ time?”

“Nothing! Nothing that merits retribution or…” Shiro hugs himself, verbally stumbling over this contradiction and knowing that Keith won’t let him get away with it. “The conversation up at Ryoullurance’s place started going in about stuff I didn’t want to talk about. But it’s okay.”

Keith tilts his head and makes a face that isn’t disbelieving, but is definitely uncertain. “If you don’t feel okay? We don’t need to do this now. It can wait—”

“Baby, come on. If you got a commission, you need to honor that. If you’re inspired about it now, then why don’t we—”

“It isn’t a commission. At all. I haven’t gotten _any_ new ones, but…” Keith walks backward, moving away from Shiro with a huff like he doesn’t want to be even an inch outside of Shiro’s personal space. Whatever he’s feeling, he stands before Shiro, in his bare skin and boxer-briefs, and puts his hands on his hips. “Do you want me to _tell_ you what my idea is, or do you want to guess?”

Shiro quirks his shoulders. “You’re up some notable amount of weight in the past twelve days, and now your jeans don’t fit. Which you found out a bit before your first text, and then you got a visit from the Muses?”

“Wait, seriously? Is it _noticeable_?”

Mouth falling open and face screwing up, Keith allows himself to slouch. Despite knowing so much better than this, Shiro can’t keep his tongue from darting across his lips. He can’t keep his eyes from zeroing in on Keith’s pudgy stomach and the way that his posture makes it pooch out that much more. The waistband of his underwear doesn’t stand a chance, curling up as the chub along Keith’s hips bears down on it. Up front, the story’s very much the same, though it seems like Keith might’ve slipped the waistband underneath the lower curve of his belly.

“Shiro, _seriously_.” Keith huffs and snaps up into a better posture. That might pull his tummy back—but the motion sends ripples through his flab, making it bob along his waistline. As he folds his arms over his soft chest, his cheeks go a bright, warm pink. “I mean, you aren’t _wrong_ about me gaining, but I didn’t think that, like—is it really _that_ noticeable?”

“Oh, yeah, it _really_ is,” purrs out of Shiro’s throat before he realizes that his lips are moving. His own face flushes hot and he barely resists the temptation to grind his teeth. “Not that I’m saying—this isn’t like it’s a bad thing—”

“Duh, of course it isn’t? Because I’m _enjoying_ this, and so are my clients, and so are yo—”

“I only mean that, like? I was _guessing_, mostly? From the jeans being out on your bed? And it’s not really as if…”

Jesus, there’s likely no way for Shiro to say what he’s thinking without it sounding creepy and weird. Worse, there’s no way for him to say it without proving one of Allura’s points for her. She may not be here to get the evidence herself—but Keith might well decide to share this with her later. If he does, then she’ll know about it and have ample reason to rub Shiro’s face in how he’s not only a hypocrite (in her eyes, anyway), but he’s also a liar and about as subtle as a brick. So much for the concept of friends respecting each other’s boundaries.

But Allura is not invited to this clip-shoot, so Shiro tries to push all thoughts of her from his mind.

With a weary sigh, Shiro makes himself look Keith in the eye and tells him, “You’ve been kind of… At mealtimes, you get really caught up in the eating? It’s like you’re challenging yourself, and it’s _amazing_. And then, in between, all anybody has to do is set some snacks down in front of you and you’ll go to town on them, y’know? Eating almost mindlessly… I don’t know if you _know_ how much you can put away when you get like that, but…”

Shiro trails off and wrinkles his nose at Keith’s expression. He’s still blushing, yes—but the grin he wears is distinctly one of _pride_. He looks like everything that Shiro’s telling him is exactly what he wanted to hear. As if this needed to be any worse for Shiro, Keith traces his fingers down the side of his stomach, then rests his hand around his belly-button.

Pressing gently into his soft flesh, he explains, “Well, between you and Hunk feeding me up, and me eating whatever I want? I’m up another five pounds already—”

Shiro doesn’t mean to scoff. He doesn’t mean to arch his eyebrow or stare too much at Keith’s tummy. But—

“Yeah, yeah, I know: it looks like it’s gotta be more than that.” Keith’s words sound exasperated, but his tone comes out too playfully to buy that interpretation. “I didn’t know how much it was until _after_ I couldn’t get those jeans done up on my own.”

Nodding, Shiro tries to make his cheeks stop blushing. He’s gotta look like a horny, flustered teenager, and that’s more than enough ridiculous nonsense out of him for the next lifetime. “So, the clip’s gonna be… You getting the jeans on and failing to button them? Then managing, and then the button comes off?”

“Well, yeah, you’re mostly right. Close enough that Ryou probably wouldn’t give you a failing grade, but…”

As he slips back toward Shiro, Keith wears a smirk that’s equal parts challenge and attempt to tease. Sidling into Shiro’s personal space, nestling himself up _so close_ to Shiro—there’s room for breath between them but not enough for Jesus, and his pudge isn’t yet hitting Shiro’s abs—Keith flashes a grin and bares his teeth. It makes Shiro feel rather like he’s stuck in the jaws of a particularly hungry lion, but that makes his heart pound so fast, so _hard_, that Keith has _got_ to hear it raising such a racket.

Yet, he reaches up to brush Shiro’s white fringe off his face so serenely, as if he hasn’t heard a thing. “I’ve made so many versions of this clip already,” he says. “Not that it ever gets old, for me _or_ for my subscribers—for some of them anyway. But I was _hoping_ that I’d get to have a costar, this time. Considering that I work alongside one, now…”

Keith tugs his hand away and takes a step back, probably so Shiro can consider his options with a clear head, think about what he really wants, and then give Keith an answer that comes from something _other_ than wanting to feel Keith’s chub squishing on him, jiggling against his muscle with every move Keith makes, so warm and soft and inviting and perfect under Shiro’s hands. Those thoughts, while delicious, will not give Keith the kind of consent he’s looking for.

Not that Shiro needs much time to think before he gives Keith a nod. “What else did you have in mind for this performance, Baby?”

Smirking, Keith presses close again, right up on Shiro’s abs. Shiro has no idea how he keeps himself from gasping. The temptation to just touch Keith like this—right now, as themselves—it’s so strong that Shiro has to ball his hands up in his jeans and cling to his seams for dear life, just so he can keep them to himself.

“Well, you’ve been having so much trouble staying _away_ from verbal humiliation.” Slipping his arms up around Shiro’s shoulders, Keith puts on the most angelic smile. “I thought we might as well go all-in about trying some, y’know? And maybe slapping me around, if you wanted to. I’m more interested in what you do with your words, but…” A shrug. “Some of my best subscribers have been asking if you’re into impact play, and seeing as you _are_…”

Shiro’s breath hitches, but he manages to croak, “Your safe-word is ‘mania.’ What about mine.”

“Good boy. Way to show initiative on asking.” Keith grins and snugs up closer, kneading his belly on Shiro’s abs and hips. It’s like he’s trying to use Shiro’s body and give himself a belly-rub—except there’s too much give, so Keith probably hasn’t stuffed himself to the point of needing one, today. “And your safe-word is ‘Darmok.’ Like that _Star Trek_ episode.”

He takes a deeper breath than necessary, pulling his stomach back and then letting his pudge surge out, back to its full glory. On his exhale, that chub slams into Shiro, so soft and plush, and even though they’ve got work to do, Keith sighs as if he knows something Shiro doesn't. He lingers, rubbing up on Shiro like a cat in heat, for long enough that Shiro’s arms start trembling. His wrists will not calm down; he’s holding onto his jeans too hard and far too tightly. But he can’t let go of them, he _can’t_. Not unless he wants to sink his hands into Keith’s chubby sides, his plump ass, his love-handles, and in so doing, ruin everything.

As much as he doesn’t like the distance between their bodies when Keith pulls away, Shiro doesn’t make a fuss. He swallows down a sigh of relief, lest he distract Keith any or make Keith decide that he doesn’t want to do this anymore. Right as Shiro thinks he’s steadying his nerves, though, Keith brushes his hands up and down his own sides, pinches his own love-handles—and Shiro has to bite his lip in order to repress any sounds that Keith could rightfully read as yearning or desire.

This clip is it, he’s absolutely certain. This is going to be the story of how Shiro dies.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tight clothes and Keith bursting out of them, belly-play, humiliation, feedist-flavored dirty talk, grinding, and for the most part, bottom!Keith. As with the previous grinding chapters, there technically isn’t any penetration, but Keith spends most of the encounter on the bottom before turning things around on Shiro.
> 
> Unfortunately, we also have Shiro eventually having an Emotional Upset moment over realizing that a lot of his humiliation-angled dirty talk draws on bullying and abuse that he has heard aimed at himself before, and he doesn’t safe-word out like he should’ve done, so he ends up taking himself to some Not Great emotional places and not letting Keith help. Because Shiro is a stupid, stubborn idiot and he cannot manage his personal life worth a good goddamn.

_“Chubby Boy Needs Help Getting Dressed.” It’s Monday morning, time for work. After a long weekend of binging and lazing around and stuffing his face, Akira finds himself in need of help getting into his clothes. He’s certain that his gluttonous ways haven’t caught up with him any further. He exercised some moderation, didn’t he? No matter how much he wants that to be true, though, his jeans have to disagree with him. When he finally manages to wiggle into a pair, he can’t get them buttoned up himself._

_Luckily, Sable is around and eager to lend a helping hand—but he’s so enamored with his fat-boy, he just might keep Akira from getting to work at all. Includes tight clothes and struggling to fit into them, jiggling and belly play, belly slapping, button popping, some humiliation, size differences and comparisons, grinding, and some sexy fat talk._

* * *

Getting ready to shoot the clip makes everything feel like it’s going to be easy. Keith holds his hair up while Shiro attaches his mic. Shiro checks the cameras one more time, in case any of them needs batteries or adjustments to any of their settings. Shiro double-checks with Keith about what the in-character scenario’s supposed to be for Sable and Akira. Keith confirms that they’re improvising more than usual and he’ll follow Shiro’s lead, wherever the moment takes him. Keith bends over, going through stretches that have no doubt gotten more difficult as he’s put on just shy of seventy-five pounds, and Shiro silently begs any god who might exist to save him and please make sure he doesn’t literally drop dead from doing this shoot.

All up, all business as usual and nothing to write home about.

Except, once Keith’s standing over by the bed, in character as Akira and ready to get going? Shiro has no earthly idea what he’s supposed to do.

Watching Keith yawn and stretch and whine about how he doesn’t feel like facing a Monday morning shouldn’t feel any different from watching him do that normally—and yet, something about it feels impossibly different, irreconcilable with everything that Shiro feels normally.

Listening to him complain while he scrubs his face, Shiro shouldn’t need to dig his back against Keith’s door-frame to keep from disappearing into his own head—but that’s exactly what Shiro needs, and there is no good reason for it. At least, no reason makes itself readily apparent, which is as good as saying that there’s no good reason for Keith to feel anything out of the ordinary.

When Keith unfurls his jeans, shaking them out and grumbling about how he hopes they hold up through the day, Shiro should feel his mouth start drying out. He should feel his lungs trying to collapse in on themselves, as if some force outside of him has completely zapped their ability to retain air. He should feel the bone-deep chill and the tight, squirming sensation of his Hanahaki trying to insist upon itself at the worst possible time as always, as if his body deliberately wants to betray him and make it so Keith can’t help but notice the red azaleas coming out of Shiro’s mouth. He should feel desire pricking at his fingertips, sparks of it worming through his veins and muscle fibers, forcing him to buckle down so he won’t just go pull Keith flush against him and kiss that unfairly beautiful mouth.

But as Shiro tucks his black fringe behind his ear, the only things he feels are the door-frame pressed against his spine and an unmistakable knot of dread. Embedded deep inside his chest, it’s colder than his Hanahaki chills and easily more cruel. It beats in time with Shiro’s pulse, threatening him with how much he doesn’t know, how much he can’t predict about any of this, how much he could lose control of this situation and see everything go up in smoke.

Thankfully, Keith drags Shiro back down to Earth, dropping onto his bed with a heavy sigh and a creaking box-spring. Granted, Shiro still has no idea what to do—but his thoughts quiet down a little bit. He keeps his mouth shut as Keith shakes out the jeans again. He inhales deeply, watching as Keith stretches out one leg, then the other. He holds his breath as Keith shoves his feet into the jeans and unfurls the black denim, tugging it up his once-quite-slender calves.

Keith gets the jeans all the way up to his knees, then gets a pensive look. Rolling his eyes and grumbling about how he’d forget his own head if it weren’t attached, he shoves himself up again. Raising his hands and pretending to stretch his back? Probably isn’t necessary, in the strictest sense of the term—but God, it’s worth every second of groaning and sucking in from Keith. When he slumps back into his usual posture, letting his belly flop out all over again, and sets all of his midsection’s soft, pale chub bouncing and wobbling? That’s worth everything for which Keith could ever hypothetically ask.

Leaning back, Keith keeps his hands at his sides, as if he’s using them to help get a crick out of his back. Instead, he shoves his belly toward the camera, not making it look bigger, exactly, but insisting upon its size. Drawing attention to how much bulk it has, how much weight he’s gained, even if it shows better in more places than his waistline.

Then, finally, he bends over to get his jeans. For a moment, he relishes in this position. With his belly-fat hanging there, he wiggles his hips. It _could_ look like he’s trying to get himself ready—at least to someone who didn’t already know what Keith’s goal is. He’s trying to give the camera another show, letting his subscribers see the way that his flesh moves and how it jiggles, even without someone there to touch him. It’s beguiling as Hell, watching a video recording of him do that, and leaning against the doorway now, Shiro can’t help wishing that he could be right there, up in Keith’s personal space, right now. Keith is so close to him, but Shiro can’t touch him yet.

Taking a deep breath, Keith rolls himself up to standing and drags the waistband of his jeans up with him. The denim snags in places, but Keith perseveres as if this doesn’t stop him. As if nothing in the world—as if nothing in the entire _universe_—ever could keep him from doing exactly what he wants. Which, in this case, means getting himself into his jeans, no matter what he needs to do in order to make that happen. He takes advantage of the moment, though. There’s too much chub lining his thighs, so much plump, soft flab that far exceeds the limits of the fabric, and Keith has to shimmy in order to get his legs all the way in. He has to slow down, inching the denim up ever-so-slowly, stretching it out and peeling it onto his skin.

As though that weren’t enough of a show, the way he moves keeps his chest and belly bouncing. Keeps his chub moving every which way, wobbling as if begging Shiro to let go of his resolve, to give up all his self-control, to leave everything else that he values behind, give in to temptation, and come get his hands all over Keith’s body. Of course, he can’t. He digs his fingertips hard into his elbow by way of reminding himself that this touching Keith_ is not a real option, at this moment._

There’s nothing that could make it an option right now, either. Shiro has to wait until Keith is ready for him. Has to wait for Keith to at least get his waistband all the way up where it belongs—and even then, he can’t rush in headlong because Keith needs to struggle for the camera first.

Letting out a heavy sigh, Keith settles the waistband right around his middle. He groans as he glances over to the open closet door, with the mirror hanging there. Maybe the cameras can’t see that—maybe _Shiro_ can’t see how Keith’s reflection looks as he turns around, poses himself at different angles and takes in the different views of his belly—but Keith sure knows how to work a mood. He knows how to convey exactly what’s going on and give the people watching him a good idea of what he’s looking at.

God, the way that Keith works is amazing, even if he isn’t doing much. Shiro’s breath hitches in his throat and he swallows thickly, hoping to dislodge it and make everything get back to working how it should—but how can he do anything else? How can he be anything _but_ impossibly turned on, watching Keith grimace as if he’s actually upset about the way that his belly protrudes from around his middle. Keith makes something hot and thick and _wanting _twist around the pit of Shiro’s stomach, pulling that scrunched up face as if he can’t believe how much bulk and flab there is around his waistline, now.

More than that, though, there’s the way that Keith touches his own body. Keith knows how to brush his hands all over the curves of his stomach, tracing them up and down the places where his flesh dips in and billows out. He knows how to squish his own rolls of chub in the exact right way to snare the viewer’s attention and never let it go. Splaying his hands flat on either side of his stomach, he pushes it out toward Shiro—and God, it takes all the effort that Shiro can muster in order for him to keep focusing on _all of Keith_, rather than losing himself in the sight of Keith’s beautiful, plump, delectably squashy stomach—and Keith allows himself to whine. If Shiro didn’t know any better, he’d almost believe that Keith is honestly upset about the weight he’s gained.

“_God_,” Keith keens, jiggling his own belly. “I so don’t have the time for this…These are supposed to _fit_…”

Maybe he’s supposed to follow Shiro’s lead, once “Sable” properly enters the scene—but thank God for Keith knowing better than to throw Shiro in without something else that he can use. So, Akira is trying to fit himself into jeans that he expected to fit. He doesn’t have the time for this… And Keith mentioned that Akira is supposed to be getting dressed for work… Shiro’s in jeans and a t-shirt himself, which might not be what Keith’s subscribers want him to wear, but it fits better with the scene… With what the scene _could_ be, anyway. It isn’t taking a coherent shape in Shiro’s mind just yet—

But then again, it doesn’t really _need_ to. Not with Keith standing there, palming at his stomach until he decides to pinch up an entire roll of belly-fat. He jiggles it harder than he needs to, sending ripples throughout his entire midsection, making all of that beautiful chub move in a way that makes Shiro’s mouth go dry. His tongue is sticking to the roof of his mouth, he’s certain of it. _Jesus_, how can Keith stand there and screwing up his face like that? How can he go so wide-eyed and pout as if he has no idea what he did to let himself go so much and get so big?

How can he look so convincingly angelic, as if he genuinely has no idea what he’s doing to Shiro? How can Keith sell that look as if he’s making Shiro’s lungs writhe and squirm inside his chest like continuing to breathe is the world’s biggest chore for them?

“This is just about the last thing that I needed today, oh my _God_…” Keith whines as he takes the sides of his fly in his hands and tugs the button toward its hole. He isn’t putting in nearly enough effort to get anywhere, but he’s moaning as though he actually expects his yanking to work. As if he’s actually upset about the way his jeans are hanging open. “Come _on_… Can’t you _please_ get with the program… _Please_ just fit already…”

He’s stalling. Maybe not intentionally, but Keith’s dragging this out so much that it _cannot_ be an accident. For the most part, he’s probably focused on the cameras. He probably couldn’t care less how this is affecting Shiro—not unless he intends to use Shiro as a litmus test of how his viewers might react—but as Keith takes in a deep breath and sucks his stomach in as hard as possible, something in Shiro’s chest sparks up and _wishes_ that maybe—_maybe_—Keith could feel how he feels. _Maybe_ Keith could take an interest in teasing him not to know how other people might react in Shiro’s position, but because he wants to get _Shiro_ wound up.

Not that Keith gives Shiro any room to dwell on this. With his stomach pulled back as far as he can manage, he doesn’t look even remotely thin—but he _does_ look like he’s got more room and more of a chance to get the button done up on his jeans. Shiro holds his own breath as he watches Keith struggle, as he listens to Keith whine—

Shiro’s breath comes out in time with Keith’s heavy sigh. But he can’t focus on anything else around them, not Keith’s belly jiggles as it flops back into place. Ebbs out, back to its uninhibited glory, full and round and flabby, begging for somebody to caress it. To come over and get their hands all over Keith’s warm skin and soft flesh.

While Keith’s whining, he catches Shiro’s eye and nods. Time for action. Time to come up with _something_ for the scene—

“Akira!” Shiro calls out, in Sable’s voice. “Come on, man. If I’m driving you in, you have to be in my car, right?”

Shiro cringes as soon as he hears himself. God, why does anybody trust him to have conversations with another human being? That’s so terrible. It’s absolutely awful as an attempt at dialogue. There’s no way that Keith’s going to like this, much less be able to work with—

“I’m _working on it_, Sable!” Keith doesn’t allow himself to break character—but before he goes back to groaning, for just a moment, he shoots Shiro a bright-eyed look. It makes Shiro blush, but maybe it’s a good sign? Keith doesn’t seem to be flagging any, still wriggling in his jeans and trying to get them done up properly—“I’ll only be a minute, okay? I just… I’m having a little bit of trouble with my jeans. But I’ve got it, everything’s under control, it’s fine, I’ve got—”

Keith cuts himself off with a gulp that doesn’t make sense. Not until Shiro realizes what he’s doing, which doesn’t hit him until _after_ he’s pushed himself off the door. He strolls over to Keith, arms folded over his chest and head tilted curiously, expression forced into something that vaguely approximates neutrality. It’s a struggle, keeping his breathing slow and even, and it’s an even bigger task to keep himself from reaching out and grabbing hold of Keith.

As soon as he’s up in Keith’s personal space… He’s _right here_ and it would be _so easy_—but no. This is _work_, not play. Sable wouldn’t do this in the same way that Shiro would. He’d play it cooler than a meat locker unless he had a good reason to do something else—which he doesn’t, not right now.

_Sable_ would comb his fingers through his white fringe, tucking it back with a beleaguered, weary sigh. He’d drag his eyes up and down Keith’s—no wait, not Keith’s, _Akira’s_—figure in perfect silence, taking stock of how Keith-Akira’s stomach pooches out, how it protrudes in a plump, beguiling mound of flab, how it pushes the sides of his fly apart, leaving Keith-Akira with a pale V of exposed skin—

“Oh, you’re having a _little_ bit of trouble with your jeans, Akira?” Huffing softly and arching an eyebrow, Shiro meets Keith’s eyes. He doesn’t allow himself to sneer too hard—not yet, anyway, because he might want to save that face for later. “That sounds like the understatement of the decade, Baby. If not an outright _lie_.”

“Wait, what—what do you…” Keith’s cheeks flush bright pink and he screws up his face with determination. Resolve. Petulance, and pluck, and a refusal to lie down and take what Shiro’s dishing out. “I have _no idea_ what you think you’re talking about, okay?”

“Oh, you _don’t_, huh?” Vaguely, Shiro feels like he’s heard words like these before. Like he should remember where they’re coming from. But he doesn’t, and when he curls his hands around Keith’s wrists—when he moves Keith’s hands away from that gorgeous stomach—everything else stops mattering so much. “You’re standing in front of me with your jeans hanging open like an all-night diner—with your _belly_ getting in the way of you _ever_ getting these things zipped up—but you seriously have no idea what I’m talking about?”

“Uh, _no_, I _don’t_! Because that’s _garbage_, okay?”

“I wouldn’t call it _garbage_, Akira. Nothing about you is garbage or even close—”

“Ugh, who do you think you _are_, sweet-talking me after you say a thing like that—”

“After I say a thing like telling you the truth, you mean?” Shiro arches both eyebrows and pouts sarcastically, as if demanding that Keith find a way to prove him wrong. “Are you really that upset about me telling you how it really is, refusing to let you hide from how these jeans of yours no longer fit—”

“They do so fit! They fit me just fine last week, why wouldn’t they still?”

“Well gosh, Akira, I don’t know…”

Shiro trails off as though he actually has no idea. While Keith is looking at his face, Shiro puts his entire hand to work and grabs up a sizable roll of belly-chub. When Keith squeaks for him, Shiro gets a warm rush of _something_—an intoxicating, head-spinning sensation that jolts throughout his chest. It could make him disappear into his own thoughts again, could all too easily sick if he didn’t have his fingers sinking into something as solid and stable as Keith’s body.

Grinning, Shiro rolls the plush flab between his fingers. “I haven’t seen you wear these jeans in a while. Like, you definitely didn’t wear them in the past week. And judging from the way your body feels? I’m pretty sure you’ve put on more weight since you last broke out these pants.”

“So what if I have? It isn’t enough that these shouldn’t fit!” Keith huffs as though Lance is daring him to yet another stupid contest that ends with both of them in pain. Locking eyes with Shiro and leaning in closer to him, Keith snarls, “Why are you wearing such a loose t-shirt, then? What are _you_ hiding under there?”

Both of Shiro’s eyebrows try to leap up off his forehead. He hopes that it looks appropriately skeptical and doesn’t let Keith see that he found a dare that stings. “Well, I’m not hiding a chubby belly like yours. Mostly on account of how I haven’t put on any weight, lately—”

“Put up or shut up, then.” Keith snorts as though he can’t believe that Shiro would even remotely consider trying to beat him about anything. He tugs on the hem of Shiro’s shirt but doesn’t make any moves to take it off. “If you’re not scared of letting me see what your body looks like? If you’ve_ really_ got nothing to hide from me, then why don’t you let me see what’s going on—”

He stops talking as Shiro tugs his shirt off and throws it to the floor.

Looking at Shiro, Keith’s breath hitches in his throat—which would make sense if this were the first time that he’s seeing Shiro topless? But since he _isn’t_ new to this sight, and since Shiro kept his abs pulled tight during their last clip too, Keith’s wide-eyed, open-mouthed staring makes Shiro’s brain fall all over himself, trying so hard to understand what in the Hell is even going on right now. What could Keith possibly need to have explained? All of this is perfectly straightforward—

Until his hands land on Shiro’s bare shoulders. They’re warm—more so than usual, even, and Keith’s always run hotter than most people Shiro’s ever known—and Keith doesn’t content himself with simply squeezing Shiro’s shoulders. Instead, he traces down Shiro’s chest, pauses only to cop a feel of Shiro’s pecs. Shiro doesn’t allow himself to react to that—at least, he doesn’t let himself sigh or gasp or pull any kind of face—but it’s okay because Keith sighs enough for both of them. It’s such a sweet sound, a perfect mix of contentment and yearning, and God, it sounds so earnest that Shiro almost lets himself believe that this isn’t a video shoot, that there’s more to this than pleasing a crowd of people whom he will hopefully never meet.

Keith’s next move is touching _Shiro’s _stomach, spread-eagling his palms and rubbing his fingers all over Shiro’s abs. It’s like they’re standing by the baggage claim again, except for how Keith goes in even harder. He lets himself touch more of Shiro’s middle, brushes his fingers over every exposed inch of skin and kneads at Shiro’s muscle as though he hasn’t had his hands on Shiro’s body since he’s been back from California.

“God, you’re so _tight_, Sable…” Keith’s eyes light up like fireworks or Christmas morning. He smiles and it looks so open, so earnest, that Shiro can’t fight back against the blush that rises on his cheeks—but Keith’s too preoccupied with feeling up Shiro’s abs, so of course he isn’t interested in the faces that Shiro’s making. “Why would you ever hide a set of abs like these?”

“Uh, mostly because it’s _cold_ outside? But hey, if you wanna keep me topless now, then that’s okay.”

Which sounds so much more like _Shiro_ than it does _Sable_, and Shiro has to fight himself to keep from cringing openly. Pursing his lips, he nudges Keith’s hands off of his middle—then pulls Keith flush against him and lets his lips curl up at the startled noise Keith makes for him. He slings one arm around Keith’s waist, holding him in place, and uses the other to brush Keith’s hair off of his forehead. Shushing Keith softly, Shiro rubs up on Keith’s belly. He kneads at Keith’s plump flesh with his muscle, rolling against Keith’s chub… Oh God, he needs to keep himself grounded—

But oh no, Keith’s body is so warm against him—Keith’s belly is so soft, his chest is so plush, his chub makes a line of heat against Shiro’s body—and God help Shiro, but squeezing one of Keith’s love-handles goes straight to Shiro’s dick. He doesn’t get hard yet, but even before Keith whines about that contact—even before he keens as if he wants for Shiro to pinch him even harder—the way that Keith’s flesh yields to his touch makes Shiro’s cock twitch with desire and with possibility.

He needs to stay focused, though. Needs to stay grounded in the moment and remembering what’s going on here. Needs to keep working on this shoot and making it good for Keith’s subscribers, instead of letting himself getting completely up his own overactive imagination—or worse, getting lost in the idea that Keith might ever love him back.

“It definitely feels like there’s more of you here, Akira.” Shiro leans down, noses at Keith’s cheek as his face heats up and his skin flushes even redder.

Without a word, Keith squirms against Shiro’s chest. He doesn’t put up that much of a fight, but still whines when he can’t get free. Looking Shiro in the eye, he gives a quick nod—and listening to that silent cue, Shiro tightens his embrace. There isn’t much too closer that he can pull Keith—Hell, there’s barely enough room between their bodies for the air itself—and Shiro inhales sharply as Keith keeps putting up his play-struggle.

“Mmmm, can you feel that? The difference between our bodies, Baby?” Shiro presses back against Keith, tries to insist even more on Keith’s belly with his abs. Maybe this helps make the point, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there isn’t a real point at all—but a groan claws its way up out of Shiro’s throat as he rubs up on Keith, pressing his hard stomach against Keith’s soft belly. “Can you feel all that muscle? Because this is what you get from eating right and going to the gym—”

“Yeah, what? A body like a Ken doll? Like a complete off-brand knock-off Ken doll?”

Keith snorts and wriggles like a worm on someone’s fishing hook. He nearly manages to pull away—but before Shiro can fully consider letting up, Keith nods again. Jerking his head so quickly that the future audience might miss the gesture. Letting Shiro know to hang on tighter. To keep refusing him any leeway, refusing to let him go.

When this permission gets Keith tugged in harder, he whines with longing. At least, it’s bound to sound like yearning. Anyone who isn’t doing a scene with Keith could easily mistake it for the real thing, and right now? It’s more than close enough for Shiro.

“Oh, there’s no need to be jealous, baby.” He pulls back only far enough to move his face. Nosing at Keith’s cheek is nice—but it’s nothing compared to nudging their foreheads together. “You don’t need abs like mine to be beautiful. Anyway, with the way that _you _eat?” He kneads his fingers into Keith’s love-handle—then switches gears and scratches at Keith’s side instead. That makes Keith whine, which in turn makes Shiro grin.

Still, he doesn’t let that dissuade him from saying, “I don’t think you’re ever slimming down again—”

“I could so! If I ever wanted to, I mean—”

“That’s what they all say, Akira, and do you know how often a claim like that is true?” He hesitates, but when Keith doesn’t answer, Shiro chuckles. “_Never_. That’s how often it’s true. When a growing fat-boy like you says that he could lose the weight any time he wanted but he doesn’t want to yet? That’s one of the biggest, self-deluding crocks that any human being will ever tell themself. And deep down inside…”

Shiro traces his lips along the apple of Keith’s cheek. He teases them along Keith’s softened jawline and his pudgy chin without giving him even the hint of an actual, proper kiss. Not even when Keith keens like that’s the only thing he needs. As if he’s dying and Shiro could literally provide the kiss of life and through some kind of magic that only exists inside of fairy tales, find a way to keep Keith’s heart from stopping. As if the only thing in life that he’s ever really wanted is a kiss from Shiro and he can’t stand the fact that Shiro won’t give him one already.

Whining like that gets Keith nowhere slowly, not least because the sounds he’s making are _oh so pretty_. Letting slip another snicker, Shiro brings his mouth right up square with Keith’s. He hovers there, so close that there’s no reason why the two of them shouldn’t be locking lips… So close that he can feel Keith’s hot, heavy breaths inside of his own mouth—but Shiro doesn’t close the distance and plant a kiss on Keith.

That makes Keith _groan_ instead of whining, but that doesn’t exactly make Shiro want to let Keith go. Especially not if Keith wants to put up a fight about it.

Except—does he, though? It’s hard to tell what Keith really, _really_ wants. Sure, his belly wobbles as he writhes on Shiro—but there’s no discernible intent behind those motions. Keith’s not _trying_ to tease Shiro with the motions of his body. He isn’t _trying_ to struggle, isn’t _trying_ to get himself free. He might not even care if he gives off the appearance of struggling. Either he’s frustrated by the lack of kissing or he just wants to keep touching Shiro, keep feeling the way that his chub squishes on Shiro’s abs.

Neither of those options seems like a decent explanation—but the latter’s probably more likely.

“Mhm, yeah, Baby,” Shiro purrs, right up against Keith’s cheek. He pecks at the corner of Keith’s mouth, an unspoken promise. “Deep down inside of your pudgy, chunky, fat-ass body? Inside of this chest and all the blubber that you’ve put on lately?” Chuckling, Shiro kisses Keith on the mouth, if only briefly. “I think you know that I’m only telling you what’s true.”

Keith whines like he has a mind to protest—but he can’t get any words out. He rocks his hips at Shiro, bumping his belly against Shiro’s abs like he wants Shiro to feel all his doughy chub—and then gasps when Shiro cops a feel of his ass. He stretches his palm and fingers to their limit, trying to get as much of Keith’s sweet, plump backside in his hand as possible—and oh_ God_, but Shiro can’t help groaning when he fills his grip with that soft, supple flab.

“Maybe you’re just _jealous_ of all this body, though.” Keith says this softly, but not quietly, and rubs on Shiro more slowly. With more purpose, like he has a task to see to—and that task might well be finding a way to kill Shiro with his hips. Slithering against Shiro’s front, Keith sighs like he’s begging Shiro to somehow prove him wrong. “I bet that’s it, the jealousy? Because you’re _always_ working out, y’know—”

“Yeah, because I’ve got the discipline to stick to an actual gym schedule—”

Keith snorts as if that’s the most hilariously stupid thing that Shiro’s ever said. “What you’re calling discipline, Sable? That looks more like anxiety, to me—”

“Are you sure it doesn’t look like a giant chocolate fudge cake to you, Baby?” Shiro huffs, pinching Keith’s plump ass and bucking back at him, for once. That only makes Keith insist himself on Shiro one more time—but Shiro pushes his way through groaning. He chokes on that sound and makes himself say, “Or maybe it looks like pizza, huh? Since I know how much you liked eating the pizza that I whipped up for you?”

“You’re just lucky that I’d ever trust a skinny chef—”

“Oh, you’d trust _any_ chef who agreed to give you what you wanted.” In the face of Keith grinning like he has no intentions of arguing that point, Shiro purses his lips and narrows his eyes. There’s a part of him—not an insignificant part, either—that can’t help but feel awed by Keith. By the way that he moves, the way he smiles, the way he’s so comfortable and happy with his body like this, with his extra weight—“You’re wrong if you think you’re fooling anybody, Baby. Everybody knows”

If he really means to make a point, Keith doesn’t need to snake his arms up around Shiro’s shoulders. He doesn’t need to keep rocking his hips on Shiro or pressing all of that warm, plush weight on Shiro’s middle. He doesn’t need to move on Shiro more than he already has—but the last thing that Shiro would do is ask for Keith to stop. Not today, and not so long as Keith keeps wanting Shiro as a costar. Each time he shifts around, each time he gets that beautiful flab all over Shiro’s skin, Keith makes Shiro’s throat stutter like it’s too much of a chore to let him keep on breathing.

He moves as if he means to stifle Shiro with his body—as if he means to smother Shiro more than Shiro’s ever done to himself—and Jesus, Shiro wishes that Keith could make good on a threat like this, today. That isn’t part of the plan that they agreed to, but they can come back to it later, as long as Keith doesn’t call this arrangement off.

For now, all Shiro can think of—all that he can make himself do just yet—is slip his free hand down Keith’s back. Over his shoulder, Shiro smirks at the camera that’s got the best view of what he’s doing. Before he can allow himself to hesitate, he gropes Keith’s ass with both hands. Keith gives up a soft gasp and that could distract Shiro so very easily. Could let him get contented with this effort—but when Keith grinds on him again, Shiro grabs him tighter. Pushes their bodies closer together and holds on tight. Like he doesn’t mean to let Keith go because unless Keith _wants_ to get away from him, he’d really prefer not to. Putting any distance between himself and Keith would be the worst of all possible fates.

Another moan from Keith, all hot and breathy against the skin of Shiro’s neck. So full of yearning and desire. Nobody watching this clip later could think to question how much Akira wants Sable. It may not be as good as Keith truly wanting Shiro as himself, but it’ll do for now.

“If you’re feeling any kind of way about what I’m saying?” Shiro forces himself not to laugh, not to go any further than lipping at Keith’s cheek. “If you’re feeling like I’m being cruel, or you’re getting that little twist of guilt—”

“Why should I feel _guilty_ for living how I _want_?”

“Well, you’re keeping us from getting you off to work on-time.” Shiro’s voice probably doesn’t sell that line. Either the amusement is too strong or Shiro isn’t being harsh enough—but he tries smirking at the rear-view camera and squeezing on Keith’s love-handles. “Besides, you’re getting so _chubby_, Baby, when you used to be so _thin_. D’you have any idea how much I have to lift, just to keep up with you? So I won’t ever _drop you_ right on your big. fat. _ass_?”

Keith snickers and it goes to Shiro’s head as much as the way he presses his hip into Shiro’s hand. “Yeah, like you don’t _love _having all these rolls to get your hands on. Like you aren’t completely crazy for having more of me to love.”

It’s a miracle that Shiro manages to shrug. That he manages to play this noncommittally when Keith’s completely right and Shiro would die for a chance to prove this to him. It’s probably an even bigger sign of his restraint that he doesn’t allow himself to grin, that he makes himself tell Keith, “What I’m into isn’t relevant right now. You’re gonna be bigger than a house, if you keep up the way you have. If you keep stuffing your face like the gluttonous, greedy, flab-laden fat-boy that you’ve let yourself become, Akira? All that’s gonna happen is that you keep on getting _fat_.”

“I haven’t really let myself go _that_ much.” Arms securely around Shiro’s shoulders, Keith pulls back enough to let Shiro see him pouting. Fluttering his long, thick lashes and jutting out his lower lip in a way that _almost_ makes Shiro forget reality and believe what Keith is saying. Exactly what he _means_ by that expression is anybody’s guess—but he keeps it up while wiggling his hips and jostling his belly, shaking all of that pudgy flesh against Shiro’s stomach. “I think that you’re exaggerating, Babe. Just because I’m not a skinny little bitch like you—”

“You mean because _I _don’t stuff my face like I can’t control myself?” Shiro slides one hand—the one that’s closer to the center camera—off of Keith’s hip. He rests it on the side of Keith’s belly, forces himself to keep his touch lighter than the breeze. “Is _that_ why you’re questioning the truth here?”

“Maybe I just think that your perspective’s slanted. And that you aren’t exactly fair about this—”

Shiro cuts Keith off with a laugh that’s downright arctic cold. “You _really _think that I’d lie to you because I know how to keep myself restrained?”

He drums his fingers on Keith’s chub. Feeling it wobble against him, Shiro swallows his own gasping and his own contented sigh. Sable wouldn’t make a sound like that right now, so Shiro can’t afford to do that, either. “Or that knowing how stop chowing down when I’ve had enough means I’d ever try to fool you?”

He brushes his fingers in gentle circles, teasing like he might do something more, even though he doesn’t rightly know what that could be, yet. So many ideas, so many possibilities, so many things that Shiro could do to Keith—and all of them are equally appealing. “Or do you think I’m lying because I stick to my diet? Because I remember to eat anything but sweets and junk and garbage that’ll only make you plump up faster?”

He still hasn’t made up his mind on what to do with Keith’s belly—but for now, Shiro contents himself with nosing at Keith’s cheek. “Is _that_ why you think I’m kidding about how much you’ve been pigging out? Because I’ve got abs, and it’s easier to mock me for them than accept that you’ve been letting yourself turn into a butterball?”

Keith rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “Fuck’s sakes, Sable! That’s not even kinda what I _said_. Come on, you _know_ that isn’t what I said!”

Despite that protest, Keith allows himself to snicker. It comes out even harsher than the laugh that Shiro threw in Keith’s face—and the fact that Keith pulls that off? The fact that he’s grinning like he wants to devour Shiro, right here and now? God, that makes Shiro _want_. More than anything else that Keith has done so far today, the gleam in his eyes makes Shiro _want_ him. Makes Shiro want to give Keith anything that he could ever ask for.

“Maybe it wasn’t what you _said_, but I’m pretty sure that’s what you _meant_.”

Giving Keith the most angelic smile that he can muster, Shiro grabs up a huge roll of pudge along the side of Keith’s stomach. His own breath tries to hitch in his throat, the way that Keith’s does. But Shiro doesn’t let that happen, this time. He curls up his lips so tightly that they almost disappear into his smirk, and he shakes the bit of belly-fat that he’s got his hands on. Forcing himself to meet Keith’s eyes instead of acknowledging the way that Keith’s body moves—the way that Keith’s flab jiggles and wobbles like it can’t stop moving—Shiro kneads at Keith’s pudge and smirks like he has no idea what he’s doing.

“With a belly like _this_, Baby?” He pinches harder, hangs on like that until he makes Keith whine. “I think I know _exactly_ why you’re protesting too much right now. It’s so much easier, making it seem like everybody else has the problem, isn’t it? Making yourself think that everybody’s biased, instead of accepting that you’ve let yourself go so much that you can _never_ get your skinny body back?”

“Oh, but that assumes I’d even _want_ to, Sable.” Keith presses back onto Shiro. Closes any distance that he let slip in between them. Kneads that doughy stomach up on Shiro’s abs and slips one of his thighs in between Shiro’s legs. Rubbing that soft, shapeless flap against Shiro’s muscle, Keith never once takes his eyes off of Shiro. “Why would I want to go back to counting calories like you? Or worrying about what I eat like you? Or making myself _miserable_ in the name of being a skinny. little. _bitch_. like. _you_.”

“Maybe you could be someone who ever wants to get his ass felt up again.” Eyebrows arched, Shiro tries to slide a hand into Keith’s back pocket. He only makes any headway by tugging on Keith’s jeans. He drags them down, yanking the waistband back and shoving them underneath the plump, full curve of Keith’s backside—and he snorts. “Nowhere left to hide with evidence like that, y’know? If your jeans are too tight for me to feel you up through your back pocket, then I’m pretty sure you’ve just outgrown them.”

“I dunno, you were doing a pretty good job _without_ shoving your hand all up in there. You could keep feeling up my ass exactly like you did before.”

“But do you really _want_ that, though?”

No matter how much he wishes that Keith would go out with him as boyfriends—no matter how much _better_ Keith could do and how much _better_ he deserves in whoever he decides to date—Shiro chuckles like he’s never heard something more ridiculous than this idea. A muscle-bound gym-rat heading out and about with a growing fat-boy who can’t fit in any of his clothes… What a concept. Splaying his hand on Keith’s side, Shiro presses into the soft flesh of Keith’s tummy.

“Do you _want_ to go out with me in public and _know_ that everybody’s staring? That everybody’s watching us and wondering why a stud like me would ever deign to be seen with you?”

Shiro swallows thickly and almost allows his face to drop. He _almost_ lets himself get hung up on what he’s saying and how _horrible_ it sounds. Where is this even _coming_ from? A shake of his own head and a quick pinch of Keith’s belly-fat—that keeps Shiro grounded enough that he doesn’t entirely lose himself in his own thoughts.

“Of course, anybody who’d stare at you like that doesn’t know you in the way that I do.” Shiro nudges his forehead into Keith’s. “But that’s a curse for you, not just a blessing. Sure, they won’t know how gluttonous you are, not unless they catch you eating. They won’t know that you can’t help but stuff your face whenever anybody leaves chocolate and sweets within arm’s length. But on the other hand?”

He doesn’t let go of Keith’s belly, but stretches out his hand, trying to get more of Keith’s flab wrapped up in his hand. “They won’t feel the way that I do about you. They won’t look at you and think you’re beautiful. Ravishing. Magnificent. Or anything like that. They’ll take one look at you and write you off as little more than a fat, greedy piglet who has no sense of self-control.”

With his hand lying spread-eagle on Keith’s stomach, Shiro digs in his fingertips. Were he doing this as himself instead of Sable, he’d turn this into a massage. He’d go in soft with the intention of staying that way and pampering Keith’s tummy, the way that he deserves. “Anyone who saw us out together would see me as a total stud… And you as a ballooning ball of blubber who doesn’t seem to care about what’s happened to his body as he’s stuffed his chubby face and crammed this gut full to bursting with treats he didn’t need.”

Chuckling softly, Shiro grabs up as much of Keith’s paunch as he can get. Strains his hand to make sure that he cannot possibly grab up any more of this soft, plush chub. “All that anybody else sees when they look at you? Is a fat-boy who’s only getting fatter because you. _can’t_. help. yourself—”

“Just because you _say that_ doesn’t make it _true_.” Defiant as ever, Keith writhes on Shiro. Cocks his own hip so that he pushes his belly even further into Shiro’s hand. When Shiro grabs him harder and jostles it again, Keith grins. He moans for that rough shake as if he’s already hard and needs something more than grinding on Shiro’s hips. “How do you _know_ that I couldn’t lose the weight if I ever wanted?”

Dimly, Shiro wonders if this has wandered too far from their alleged primary focus, the fact that Keith is too big for these jeans.

But before he can allow himself to chase that rabbit, Keith’s rubbing on him with more intent than ever, leaning up while tugging Shiro down, and getting right up by his ear. Maybe he could tease Shiro. Egg him on or goad him into being harsher by protesting too much, the way that he’s done so far.

Instead, Keith makes a soft, tight, breathy sound and tells him, “You _don’t_ know that for certain, do you?”

“You used to be so _athletic_, so _trim_, so _enviably_ skinny, and now? I’ve got you trying to squash me with your gut.” At first, Shiro doesn’t recognize his own voice. He hasn’t broken out this low, throaty, heavy way of speaking for so long—but he squeezes Keith’s roll of pudge instead of allowing himself to dwell on it. “What more proof do I need, Akira?”

“You _know_ you love having all this chub to fondle… All this soft, warm body, right here, waiting for you to love it…” Keith laughs like he knows he’s telling a truth about _Shiro_, not one about Sable. “You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if I ever went on a freaking diet—”

“You mean that _you _wouldn’t know what to do with yourself. You’d put in so much effort, coming up with meal plans and calorie counts, workout goals and plots for everything to endure at the gym, and lists of food that you are and aren’t allowed to eat…" Shiro tightens the arm around Keith’s waist. He kisses Keith’s forehead, then smirks and looks him in the eye. “But we both know how much you’d crumble on that diet, Baby. You’d feel so _hungry_ after your egg whites and your grapefruit. You’d _long_ for the sweet comfort of your favorite, sugary treats, and the feeling you get after you’ve spent one sitting eating more than I do in a _week_.”

Which is an exaggeration and they both know it—but does Keith _really_ need to scrunch up his face like that? Does he need to put on that irritated bunny expression like Shiro’s started spouting off at him in Japanese, which for the life of him, Keith still doesn’t understand? He wanted Shiro to verbally humiliate him, so that’s what Shiro’s doing. Literally what about this situation makes no sense to Keith? It’s not like he’s trying to ignore the nagging sense that he _knows_ where these words are coming from, even if he can’t pull up a name.

No matter—Shiro gropes Keith’s ass and grins at him. “No matter how much you swore up one side and down the other that you’d stick to your diet and slim down? You’d break those promises to yourself in pieces before you even got to lunchtime.”

Keith huffs, still looking like he can’t make heads or tails of this turn. “You could be surprised, y’know. Maybe I’ll prove you wrong, alright? Maybe I really _will_ get on a diet, go back to the gym, slim down… That’d be the right surprise to show you—”

Shiro laughs. It’s cold, and it’s high, and he reminds himself too much of certain high school bullies who he’d prefer to forget as soon as possible. That makes Shiro’s stomach twist itself up in knots of guilt—but pressing hard against Keith’s belly keeps him from getting too distracted. Whatever Keith’s thinking, something makes him blush. When Shiro leans down to kiss him right on his round, pretty, bright red cheeks, Keith ducks his chin and lets slip a squeaking noise.

“How can you keep hoping for things you are _never_ gonna get, Akira?” Shiro lips at Keith’s skin and caresses a love-handle. “The only way that you’ve surprised me lately? Is in how big and soft your _chubby_ ass gotten… How much you’ve plumped up and let yourself go—”

“I know how to control myself! I don’t _want_ to diet, but I could still—”

“Maybe you _could_ have kept yourself from porking out so badly, once upon a time.” Shiro pulls back so he can watch Keith’s face. So he can watch the way Keith’s eyes go wide when he whines about Shiro jiggling his belly and see his expression shift as Shiro kneads his doughy flab. “Months ago, when you first started down the path that brought you here? I’d have believed that you still understood self-control. Back then, you_ could_ have decided to hold back on the indulgences, and hit the gym with me instead of sitting on the couch, and yeah, you could’ve lost your starter belly before it got too big for you to handle. You could’ve toned up those first ten or fifteen pounds, and gotten your own set of abs.”

Realistically, Keith’s body probably couldn’t have done that. Unfortunately for him, he’s always had trouble with getting muscle to show on him even half as well as fat does. No matter what he ate or how much work he ever did, Keith could never get the kind of body that Shiro’s worked his ass off, striving for.

For right now, though, that doesn’t matter. All that matters is looking Keith in the eye and slapping at his tummy. “You’re so far gone, I don’t think you could _ever_ slim back down. You couldn’t even get below two-hundred pounds, much less back down to one-fifty, like you want so badly.”

“But I _don’t _want that,” Keith says, simply and with his eyes dead-locked on Shiro. “I just want my _jeans_ to fit.”

“Which they’re never gonna do again unless you drop some weight. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, Baby. Thank you.”

Shiro huffs and gets a rush of pride in how well he’s pulling this off—but in the face of Keith’s pouting, it’s a struggle to keep up Sable’s judgmental, harsh façade. Especially with Keith’s confusion seeming more than slightly genuine, Shiro’s heart does back-flips like an Olympic Gold medal gymnast. Keith screws up his mouth like he’s trying to pick out some kind of hidden meaning in what Shiro’s saying. Like he recognizes these words from _somewhere_ but he can’t quite put his finger on where he heard them first or why they’re ringing any bells.

Externally, Shiro forces his lips to hold that frosty, knife’s edge smirk. Maybe he wants to scrunch up his face until he puzzles out what’s wrong with him—or else abandon the discussion and go back to staring at Keith with the soft, warm look that everyone else describes as _heart-eyes_—but Shiro’s desires aren’t what matters. Not when he’s playing Sable.

Internally, though, his chest gets that chill that usually plays prelude to his Hanahaki coughs and his lungs writhe against his ribs more intently than Keith does against his hips. The only reason why Shiro doesn’t feel frozen over is that Keith stays pressed against him, sharing the heat that he radiates all the time, whether or not he particularly wants to. It makes Shiro’s head spin, but not in the same, intoxicating way that Keith does with his movements. The look that Keith is giving him—the way that he’s let his eyes go wide even as his brow knots up in a genuine lack of comprehension—makes Shiro feel like he could pass out within the next five seconds.

Worse, something scratches at the back of Shiro’s mind, harder than it’s done so far. He can’t puzzle out where it’s coming from or why it’s happening. But as Shiro clamps his fingers down on Keith’s ass and jostles his belly by the pudgy roll he refuses to let go of, Shiro can’t shake off the feeling like he’s heard the things he’s saying somewhere before now. He can’t make himself lose track of the idea that he should _know_ where these words are coming from—but maybe this means that Shiro needs to.

“Hell, maybe you _should_ get on a diet.” Shiro tries to sneer, but it feels too much like a grin. “You might not lose any weight. You’ll _probably_ keep getting chubby. But you might slow down the process, and that’d be a good thing.” Snorting, he splays his hand out along Keith’s chub without letting himself press into it. “Keep gaining at the rate you have? And come Christmas, I won’t be able to fit my arms all the way around you.”

“Or maybe you’re just saying that because you’re_ terrified_.” Keith leaves that idea hanging in the air between them. Silently, he slips his hands up into Shiro’s hair and runs his fingers through Shiro’s bangs because he can’t get anything else with Shiro’s ponytail obstructing his path so rudely. He keeps himself right up on Shiro like he’s stuck there with superglue. “Because you say that you can’t let yourself go, the way you wish you could—but it’s really more like you _won’t_ do that—”

“Yeah. Because I _like_ my abs and I _like_ being healthy. Not everybody wants to gorge themself and turn into a blue ribbon-winning hog like you’ve done, Baby—”

“What about because you’re afraid of what it might be like for you, getting fat.” Keith says this coolly, as if he’s so far above it all that he’s offended at being made to deal with these questions—but looking at Shiro, his eyes burn. As he shifts against Shiro’s hips, as he makes his flab shift from side to side in motions that are tortuously slow, he watches Shiro’s face like nothing else matters. Like there’s an answer and he can’t rest until he finds it. “Because you think it’s _wrong _to eat whatever makes you happy, and you’re _jealous_ of me having that kinda freedom…”

Shiro needs to say something. Keith trails off like he wants Shiro to have a shot at replying for himself. But as Shiro swallows thickly, he feels like his entire mouth is going dry. His tongue tries to stick to the roof of his mouth. Flicking out against his lips, Shiro gets no relief at all.

“That’s it, isn’t it? You’re _afraid_ of what could happen if you let yourself indulge a little. Even just once, you can’t even think about letting yourself have that.”

Keith purrs, then clicks his own tongue at Shiro—okay, time to let him go. He drags his palms down Shiro’s shoulders before wriggling away. Stepping backward, he doesn’t look away from Shiro. “You say you’re telling me the truth—but it’s just because you’re _downright terrified._ You’re not giving voice to anything that I don’t know. You’re only scared of letting yourself give in and go there, the way that I have.”

Huffing as if this conversation is beneath him, Keith stretches his arms over his head and wiggles his hips. “Because it’s _bad_ to have any body but a skinny one.” While his belly shakes back and forth, Keith shoots Shiro a knowing smirk. Whether he’s found the answer that he wanted or not, he wants Shiro to _think_ that he’s onto something. “And it’s _wrong_ for you to have any extra weight unless you hate yourself? And you _shouldn’t_ give in and experience all the pleasures that I let myself enjoy?”

With a soft, pitying sigh, Keith brushes his fingertips up and down his belly’s fullest curve. “You’re good at the game, Sable, but you can’t fool me.” He smirks. Waggles his eyebrows like it’s a dare. “You’re stalling because if I can fit into my jeans, it means that everything you starve for is a fucking _lie_.”

_I thought we covered how I _**_don’t_**_ starve myself_, Shiro refuses to let himself say, though he can’t fight off a grimace.

_I wasn’t doing that on purpose, Baby_, he tries to force to the back of his mind because it isn’t any shade of helpful. _I thought you _**_wanted_**_ me to humiliate you. That’s what you said, and all I wanted was to make you happy_—

Shiro huffs. Shakes his head. Something about that thought feels less than fully accurate—and anyway, he can’t let Keith go for too long with no response. So, he steps aside and sinks onto the mattress. He leans back and gives the center camera a good, clear view of how tight he’s pulled his abs. He has to keep them sucked in as if he’s wearing an invisible corset, to highlight the contrast between his muscle and Keith’s paunch. It’s not like Shiro really wants to sit like this or show off like he’s doing; it’s all a part of the show they’re giving Keith’s subscribers. To Keith, Shiro gives a slippery smirk like one that Lotor might decide to wear when he’s forcing himself to get along with someone who strains his patience to the breaking place.

“Prove me wrong then, Baby.” He drums his fingertips and crosses his legs at the knee. That’s still new enough to make his heart skip a beat—but he keeps his focus on Keith. Doesn’t break off from watching him palm at his belly. “Get those jeans you’re wearing zipped and buttoned without them bursting open? And I’ll believe that you could still slim down, if you were so inclined.”

Flashing another grin, Shiro adds, “But if you _can’t_ get them done up? Or if they can’t contain all of the extra pounds you’ve put on? Then, I win and you have to admit that you’ve stuffed yourself well past the point of no return. You’ve completely lost all semblance of your self-control. You’ve turned into a total glutton and let yourself become a chubby, plumped up, insatiably greedy fat-boy who loves feeling weighed down by all his flab—and now?” He snorts. “Now you’re never losing _any_ of that Buddha belly or those thunder thighs.”

Shifting so the camera can see the way his muscles move, Shiro tries to grin like Lance does when he thinks he’s right. “Come on, Baby. I wanna watch you _fail_ to fit into those jeans I bought you, and then? I wanna hear you _admit_ that there’s no way that you’re _ever_ getting thin again.”

Keith quirks a pointed, skeptical eyebrow. “What do I get from this if I win, though.”

That question makes Shiro’s shoulders droop and forces him to think about his answer. “I don’t know,” he decides. “What do you _want_ to get?”

“Have a strawberry milkshake? You can share with me, if you can’t drink all of it, but…”

Looking Shiro in the eye, Keith slouches. He pouts more like himself than like Akira, just like how there’s no trace of Akira in the soft tone that Keith is using. Between the warmth in his eyes and the way they glimmer, Keith looks so much like himself that Shiro’s breath hitches in his throat. Between asking Shiro to have one of his favorite treats and making that face that Keith doesn’t show to anybody else, this request cannot be part of his façade.

“Please, Sable?” He all but begs, “You love them. And you haven’t had one in so long… Have a strawberry milkshake with me? If I win, I mean?”

Shiro keeps his face neutral, but he’s cringing on the inside. He _hates_ that he’s cringing, when Keith’s giving him that face and looking like he could cry if Shiro says the wrong thing—but God, how is he supposed to answer that? He can’t even tell how he _wants_ to answer, or what he even wants in the first place. Everything about this moment rackets around his head, tangling up in itself and tying knots with Shiro’s feelings and his insides, and it’s a huge mess that he’ll never manage to get cleaned up.

The only desire that he’s certain of: Shiro does not want to make Keith cry.

Tucking his white fringe behind his ear, Shiro nods. “You can have that even if you don’t win, Baby. I wouldn’t want you to worry yourself sick.” That answer makes Keith smile and despite feeling like his brain’s short-circuiting, Shiro feels like his chest is flooding with something that he can only describe as _pink_. Trying to grin, he ducks his chin and fusses his hand through his black bangs. “But, I mean… But you have to get the jeans on, first?”

Keith snickers as if he actually finds Shiro cute. “Almost thought you’d never ask.”

Even though he’s already struggled while standing up, Keith goes through those motions again. Inhaling deeply, pulling his stomach back as far as he can manage, tugging the sides of his fly toward each other and grunting as though he’s hell-bent on making sure that he gets the task accomplished this time. He puts on a good show, wriggling and straining and whining like there’s no tomorrow—but just as he did before, Keith gets absolutely nowhere. Even dragging the waistband underneath his belly doesn’t help him any. Maybe it could do some good on someone else, but Keith’s hips are too full and wide for him to make progress like this.

Finally, he sighs and lets his belly flop back out. With a self-deprecating smile, he quirks his shoulders. “I maybe might wanna try lying down? Unless you’d consider that me conceding defeat or something equally stupid.”

“All I said was that you’ve gotta get them zipped and buttoned, Baby.” Shiro curls his hand up in the comforter. He shifts his leg and tries to ignore the uncomfortable twist of _wanting_ down in the pit of his stomach. “Consider yourself free to improvise. I was deliberately unspecific about how you went about the process of getting this task accomplished.”

Aside from how that’s only fair, Shiro’s seen enough clips of other people going at each other in situations like the one Keith wants to play. He _knows_ some of the best things to show Keith’s subscribers—and maybe it’s not the most ethical thing that he’s done lately? But Shiro wanted to leave the option open. He wanted to open up the door and invite in so many possibilities.

Blessedly, Keith shuffles toward the bed as if he’s working on the exact same wavelength. Flopping onto the mattress with a groan, he doesn’t bother sitting up straight. Even though they have a task and they should focus, Shiro takes a moment to appreciate the view. Sitting makes Keith’s unstuffed belly look so much rounder than it does otherwise. On his feet, he looks flabbier, more shapeless—but the way he’s sitting now? It scrunches the rolls of chub up closer to each other and it makes Keith’s stomach edge out toward his thighs.

This move _also_ doesn’t help him get the jeans done up. Pushed forward by Keith’s posture, his midsection barrels through the sides of his fly like a battering ram. The V of exposed skin overflows with rolls of belly-fat and it makes Shiro wonder if Keith can ever get these jeans done up, the way they’re going for. Breathing deeply, Keith doesn’t suck his stomach in but makes it expand even further, makes it get all round and taut as if he’s trying to burst the button off or _trying_ to fake like he spent the whole day shoving too much food into his mouth. When he gives up on that, it’s with a fond, firm pat to his stomach that makes his flab jiggle, if only slightly.

“Okay, buddy, let’s come on, then.” Staring down at his lap—more accurately, at his gut—Keith caresses that mound of pale, soft, inviting flab. “I know that we can do this. I believe in you. Now, let’s get it together and get you crammed into these jeans. We’ve got a fucking bet to win.”

“Dream in one hand, Baby,” Shiro sing-songs—and he shuts up immediately when Keith flops back onto the mattress.

Not that this gives Keith too much immediate assistance. Sure, the new position makes his belly collapse ever-so-slightly, so that it doesn’t stick up or billow out nearly as much as it does when he’s upright. Yes, he sucks in harder than he did before and manages to make himself look a bit less chubby. Dedicated to his task as ever, Keith goes through the motions one more time, tugging on the fly and whining as he struggles with the button. But that doesn’t mean that Keith is actually making any headway with this project. He’s fighting with the waistband and he’s giving this his all—but the zipper stays open and the jeans remain very much unbuttoned.

Squirming around the comforter, Keith gives Shiro the impression a particularly chubby snake who’s trying to slither back into the skin that he’s just shed. His grunts and grumbles make him sound like he’s losing an argument with an opponent who’s just as stubborn as he is—and that’s not an unfair assessment of the situation. If Keith’s fly were sentient, then yes, it would definitely be a fearsome nemesis—but the reality of things is more like Keith’s waging an uphill war against the laws of physics.

“You can always concede defeat instead of fighting, Baby,” Shiro drawls, affecting his best impersonation of Lotor’s unflappably posh accent. “I _will_ still expect you to honor your end of our agreement… But you could at least spare yourself the indignity of fighting with your jeans like this.”

“Yeah, as _if_.” Rolling his eyes, Keith wriggles himself further up the bed. “Telling me to quit is only gonna make me _refuse_ to do it.”

“Oh, good. I admire that commitment, on your part—and anyway?” Shiro curls his lips up into another smirk, and he sure hopes that his eyes are glimmering deviously. This whole expression might be wasted if he can’t pull off looking like a trickster. “I’d prefer to get more of a show from you. I do enjoy how those jeans used to look on you—but what’s the point in saving them? We both know that they’re never going to fit again.”

Setting his jaw, Keith huffs as if he can’t believe that Shiro would harp on a matter that they’re supposed to have settled by now. He screws up his face like he means to spite Shiro for suggesting anything that sounds vaguely adjacent to giving up. Without lifting his head, he shoots Shiro a glare like, _“Yeah, I’m so sure that you’d love to see me quit. Well, joke’s on you, Babe. Because that’s the last thing that I’ve got a mind to do tonight.”_

Without missing a beat, Keith dives headlong back into his chosen fray. He writhes and yanks on his jeans, trying to edge the waistband up to the narrowest part of his midsection—God, Shiro remembers that motion too well. His cheeks flush warm while something sticky and shameful seeps out through his chest and stomach, spreading tendrils of heat that curl themselves around Shiro’s insides and grate along his nerves like they’ve got a mind to make him physically ill. Keith moans in frustration as he keeps up that dedicated squirming, and Shiro goes so hot that he can practically feel the sweat beading up along the back of his neck.

All that, just from watching Keith do something that Shiro used to do himself, when he was fat and trying to avoid acknowledging how much bigger he’d allowed himself to get while failing to keep up yet another diet. If he only felt a pang of shame and recognition, that would be one thing. But watching Keith go, Shiro has to fight himself to keep on breathing properly. He clutches the comforter so hard that, without it in the way, he’d be clawing up the inside of his palm. Crossing his legs more tightly, Shiro hopes that his inhale doesn’t come out as sharply as it feels—and Jesus Christ, there’s gotta be something wrong with Shiro.

Maybe Keith would join Lotor in objecting to such a way of phrasing things. But if _“wrong” _doesn’t apply to nearly getting hard right now, then what else does that word apply to anymore? Because that’s the only word that comes to Shiro’s mind for the way his cock twitches and his heartbeat races as he watches Keith wrestle with a process that Shiro knows all too well and knows better than wish on anybody because struggling into clothes that you’ve outgrown has never once been sexy, when Shiro’s suffered it himself.

Too many memories tease at the back of Shiro’s mind, cackling with intent to rear their ugly heads and _ruin everything_. Listening to Keith hissing at his waistband, Shiro remembers all the times he ever outgrew a pair of jeans and chastised himself for slipping up so badly. When Keith lifts his hips, then drops them, and the box-spring creaks in protest, Shiro barely keeps himself from flinching in recognition of having done the exact same thing too many times for him to count. Except, of course, Shiro wasn’t doing it on-camera, and he too often wound up trying not to cry. If he split a seam or popped off a button, that would break the dam and leave him sobbing with the humiliating reminder of what a flabby tub of lard he’d let himself turn into.

Having been in that position so many times before, Shiro has _no excuse_ for the way his breath hitches while he’s watching Keith. There is no justification for him looking at Keith trying to do up that button and needing to _tell himself _not to get hard. Something in Shiro must be _wrong_ for not only wishing this on anybody, but for getting turned on while it happens to his best friend.

Still, the universe cares little for how Shiro feels about the way Keith’s fighting with his jeans. Worse, Shiro would cause them nothing but trouble by letting these feelings have any leeway. The only thing for him to do is shove them down and smother them as much as possible. They’ll come back later, the way that troublesome memories and emotions _always_ do. But until such time, Shiro has to keep himself controlled—he needs to bottle up his feelings and focus on the task at hand—because the universe simply doesn’t care, which leaves Shiro with a lot of slack in need of picking up.

Similarly disinterested in the inane problems of two little people, the laws of physics don’t give a single damn about how determined Keith is to win this bet, nor do they respect his grit and drive enough to change. No matter how much effort he puts in, his struggling continues to be in vain. Each time he tugs on his waistband, he sucks in his belly as much as he can manage. He strains, and he groans, and with each new attempt, he gets closer and closer to his prize.

But every single time, no dice. Without fail, Keith ends up sighing, and whining, and letting his arms flop down to the mattress.

Shiro lets Keith go four rounds before scooting over to him and brushing his bangs back off his face. “Still in, Baby?”

“Yeah, you know it.” Keith doesn’t look at Shiro—but the way he grinds his teeth is clear enough in profile. “Why? You getting tired of waiting? Ready to hand me the win because you’re impatient, or you wish that I’d go naked, or—”

“No. None of the above.” Resting the backs of his fingers on Keith’s forehead, Shiro snorts. “I just thought that I could offer you a hand.”

Keith props himself up on his elbows, nodding and letting Shiro see a desperate, grateful pout. Understanding the message that Shiro meant exactly, he drags himself back along the bed. He gets all the way back to the headboard before dropping to the mattress again. The pause that he affords himself is brief, but maybe Keith doesn’t _need_ that much time before he tells Shiro that he’s ready.

That invitation makes Shiro’s heartbeat race so quickly, he can’t feel any of its beating. When he moves to straddle Keith’s hips, Shiro’s head spins like his body means to make good on all its threats and see him passing out on-camera. Breathing deeply, slowly, and evenly—sure, that helps Shiro out a little bit, he guesses. Settling on Keith feels solid, and present, and a perfect mix of softness, warmth, and indisputable _reality_. With his head feeling light while his body feels heavy, Shiro fights himself to just keep breathing. He fills his lungs as much as he can with each inhale, stretching them until it feels like he might find the point at which they’ll burst clear through his rib-cage.

The deep, sharp pangs from how he’s breathing keep Shiro from spiraling into a mental oblivion of his own making—and that’s a good thing, certainly. Ever so, something about finding himself in this position? Feels too impossibly good for Shiro to believe that it’s any kind of real.

The sight of Keith that he gets from this position doesn’t much help matters, either. Nearly motionless underneath of Shiro, Keith has his arms up with his hands resting behind his head in one of the positions that Shiro would want for his own wrists if Keith ever wanted to put him in a pair of handcuffs. The pillow props up Keith’s neck and allows him enough room to stretch his neck and move his head around. The way he’s resting emphasizes the roundness of Keith’s cheeks and the fullness of his growing double-chin. God, it’s all that Shiro can do to keep himself from losing track of things in how much he wants to cover Keith’s neck in hickeys.

The fact that he refrains from chasing after that desire? Is probably some kind of miracle.

With his eyelashes fluttering, his face looking so vulnerable and warm and open, and his fine, black hair sprawled out behind him, Keith wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of one of Shiro’s smutty, trashy bodice-rippers. The biggest thing that might set him apart from the leads in all those stories? Is, predictably, his weight. There are hardly any bodies on the covers of Shiro’s erotica about big handsome men and men of ample size—which is probably a good thing for those novels. If they _did_ have more actual people on the covers, then Shiro could never read them without mentally substituting those cover-boys with Keith.

Honestly, though, could anybody blame Shiro for that weakness? He’d probably find kindred spirits in almost anyone who could see Keith as he is right now, blushing bright pink and making eyes like he desperately wants Shiro to push this encounter further. It’s a picture that would make _anybody_ fall in love with Keith.

Smirking like the Devil himself, Keith writhes. His thighs rub around beneath Shiro’s backside, and his plush, full hips push out against Shiro’s thighs. He doesn’t _need_ to give up that breathy, whining sigh—doesn’t _need_ to make any sounds like he doesn’t care about the plan and only feels like getting himself off—but when Keith puts on that show, Shiro can’t the way his breath hitches in his throat. Shiro can’t help staring like the rest of the world doesn’t exist, completely transfixed as he watches Keith’s belly quiver, wobbling back and forth ever so slowly with each agonizing shift of Keith’s body underneath of him.

He can’t help the deep chill that smacks into the pit of his chest. He only barely manages to repress it and keep himself from coughing. Knowing that they need to get to work on the clip’s main attraction—knowing that he can’t afford to waste too much time on anything—doesn’t keep Shiro from taking in the view. Or from trailing the back of his hand down Keith’s torso, gently pressing against the soft mounds of his chest, tracing down the curve of his side without listening to his impulses and pushing too much on the chub, and caressing Keith’s body in a way that Sable likely wouldn’t. Not when he’s trying to be so harsh with Akira and make him blush about his weight.

Dimly, Shiro remembers what Lance and everybody had to say about his conduct and the way he looks at Keith. Cupping his hands around Keith’s breasts, Shiro tries to push those thoughts as far down as he can manage. They’re not helpful. Dwelling on whether or not he makes _heart-eyes_ when he looks at Keith? It won’t get Shiro through this. Massaging at Keith’s flesh, though, that might help him. Curling his fingers around Keith’s chest, kneading at the softness—Shiro can barely hear Keith’s contented sighing, struggling to restrain his own reactions. To keep quieter, so as not to steal the attention from the real star.

“Mmm, hope you’re not giving up on me, Sable.” Keith gives him a pointed look, all wide-eyed and earnest and teasing toward vulnerability. On anybody else, his innocence would be unimpeachable. “If I _can’t _get into these, don’t I deserve to know? I’ll need to get new pants, and probably new shirts—”

“_Probably_?” Shiro arches an eyebrow. Keith’s made his meaning obvious: Shiro needs to stay in-character. Needs to keep the scene between them moving forward. To that end, he ghosts his hands down Keith’s sides, then smirks as he pushes up Keith’s belly-fat, forcing the sides of his fly to slip apart. “With how flabby you’ve been getting, Baby? I’m pretty sure that nothing in your wardrobe’s gonna fit your _ample_ figure. Not for very long.”

He drops Keith’s chub and smirks as ripples shock through it. Before it has enough time to settle, though, Shiro starts kneading at it. He rubs the butts of his palms into Keith’s pudge, thinking of Blue and Cova and all of Aunt Satomi’s cats as he _pat pat pats_ around Keith’s middle, jostling here pressing harder there and bumping Keith’s chub around as if he’s searching for something that Keith’s hidden in it.

Even though Keith literally just called him out on stalling, he doesn’t seem to mind this deviation from their course. Bucking his hips, he puts his stomach even further into Shiro’s hands, and when Shiro pushes on a spot around Keith’s belly-button, Keith moans for him. Throws his head back as though he’s actually getting off. Maybe that won’t be too far off: the next time that Keith lifts his hips, Shiro rides the motion and knocks him back down to the mattress. On one hand, that makes the flesh along Keith’s middle tremble.

On the other, though, Shiro can’t miss the erection that Keith grinds against his ass.

Still, he can’t afford to let Keith _know_ he’s noticed it. At least, not until they’re further into this clip’s main event. So, with Keith worming underneath him and making those hot, lustful noises every time his cock rubs up on Shiro’s body, Shiro makes himself keep massaging at Keith’s waistline. He makes himself keep thinking about Blue, and Cova, and Ginger, and The Lady Chablis, and every other questionably named cat that his aunts have ever made a home for.

More specifically, Shiro thinks of how the myriad cats in his life used to nudge their paws around his own body. How he couldn’t lie down within fifty feet of any of them when he was fat, not unless he _wanted_ a cat to jump up in his lap and invite themself to nudge their paws through his blubber. Whatever those little monsters thought that they were doing, it invariably made Shiro’s entire face catch fire and blush scarlet. Whether the cats did their worst or not, having them play with all his extra weight like that… It felt like they were rubbing his face in something that he needed to keep hidden. That attention made guilt twist around his throat, his lungs, the deepest part of his stomach.

Each time they decided that Shiro’s girth was their new plaything, it was like a reminder of how fat he’d gotten. After every failed diet left him even bigger than before, the cats’ little game might as well have been a form of torture. He couldn’t tell them to leave him be or shove them off himself, not when they didn’t _mean_ to get on his nerves or upset him any. It wouldn’t have been fair to lash out at the cats because how _could_ they know that Shiro didn’t want them touching his enormous belly, or playing with his fat like it belonged to them, or getting their paws all over his immense, bulging, plumped up, elephantine, obese body and making every single roll of flab jiggle without an end in sight, all with the way they refused to let up on handling him—

Even without being stuck inside his former flabby prison, Shiro can’t keep his cheeks from heating up at the mere _memories_ of how it felt when those cats got on his belly. But his mouth curls up into a cold, hard smirk. This ought to work, ought to enhance the humiliation. It’s a perfect resource for him to draw on in this play of their—except for the way that Keith’s closed his eyes and sighing like this is the best way that anybody’s touched him in months.

Shiro furrows his brow and squints, but he can’t pick out anything he might be missing. There’s no tell-tale curve to any part of Keith’s expression, no stray twitches that betray him and spell out how much he doesn’t actually enjoy this. As Shiro slows down the pace of his massage, he coaxes even deeper-rooted sounds from Keith. Soft though they are, those moans claw their ways out of his throat and tumble past his lips, and each time Shiro goes in harder on Keith’s belly, the moans seem heavier. More laden down with longing. More like they need to struggle out of him, or like Keith’s giving too much thought to his attempts at finding Shiro’s rhythm and meeting Shiro’s touch.

“Oh my _God_, Akira are you being serious?” Shiro spits out the words before he even knows that he’s having an idea. He doesn’t stop touching Keith—but he rubs harder on a particularly flabby spot around Keith’s belly-button. He scoffs at the whiny sound that Keith deigns to give him. “You’re actually _enjoying_ this, aren’t you? I’m squishing on this chunky belly that you’ve gotten. I’m feeling up all the places you’ve plumped up. I’m _showing_ you this evidence of how much weight you’ve packed onto your figure lately—and you’re absolutely relishing in that.”

Keith makes a noncommittal noise, the vocal equivalent of shrugging. “You’re an artist with your hands, Babe. Was I not _supposed_ to like it?”

“Why would you enjoy it? Having my palms all over you like this…” Smiling like an oil spill, Shiro brushes his fingertips around Keith’s pudgy sides, the places where his chub curves out even more than usual because he isn’t sitting up. “My every motion going at your body, finding all of your chubby parts and making you _feel_ how much heftier they’ve gotten…” He lets up on the kneading, gently pinches a sizable roll of belly-fat instead.

“My touch sinking into the places where you _used_ to be so taut, and tight, and fit, and trim…” He rubs harder than ever at Keith’s pudge and smirks at the keening sound that Keith gives up for him. “Seeking out where you used to be so thin, and used to have that hard, firm, _enviable_ muscle…” He drums his fingertips along Keith’s love-handles, then scratches at his stretch-marks. “Reminding you that you’ve lost the slim physique that most people would’ve killed to have, themselves…”

By way of emphasizing how different Keith’s body is from when he started gaining—how much of an impact the almost-seventy-five pounds have made on his once-slender figure—Shiro shakes the roll of chub. He writhes against Keith’s hips not to tease him, but to work out the _wanting_ that’s knotting up down in the pit of his stomach, just from watching the way that he’s made Keith’s body move for him. When he lets go, Keith’s belly flops back into place. Without missing a beat, Shiro dives into it, pushing down on the middle of that quivering mass of flesh.

“My hands digging and digging and _digging_ at the flab that’s moved in while you’ve been stuffing yourself with all those sweets and all that extra pizza…” As if it helps him illustrate his point, Shiro bears down on Keith, shifts as much of his weight as he can into his palms, leans into Keith’s stomach and snakes toward him, shifting his hands through all of that delectable, squishy paunch.

When Keith groans for him, Shiro snorts. He splays his hands out over the fullest part of Keith’s stomach and twitches his fingers, teasing like he might give Keith’s paunch a proper squeeze. “I’m right here, _showing_ you how much you’ve let yourself go and what a toll that indulgence has been taking on your body…”

He writhes on Keith—but that isn’t good enough. Isn’t making Keith’s body showcase all its treasures. Humming pensively—pondering his options—Shiro gropes at some of the fat along Keith’s side, just so he won’t leave Keith without any contact for too long. “I’m not letting you hide from how soft you’ve gotten with these extra pounds… Must be getting close to, what now, d’you think? You’re probably pushing eighty pounds gained since you started… If not, then you’ll get there in due time…”

An idea sparks up and Shiro wriggles backward. Away from Keith’s crotch and onto his thighs. Grinding on him, Shiro forces himself not to smile at how much give Keith’s legs have beneath his ass. He makes himself stay quiet about how they yield when he squeezes them between his own legs. “I’m not giving you room to ignore how big and plump and round you’re getting… How you were so athletic before you started gaining, and now, you’ve got all this _blubber_ that’s moved in… All this new bulk that’s weighing you down…”

Shiro rolls out his back and takes a deep breath to steady himself. To keep his nerves from going too tense or catching fire as he lifts himself off of Keith. Adjusting his position, Shiro can’t run straight into the idea that he’s toying with. Instead, he bats at Keith’s soft, plump underbelly and smirks at the way it makes his entire midsection bounce. “I’m not letting you deny how much you’ve been ballooning in the past few months… How much bigger, and rounder, and chubbier you’ve been getting since you decided to relax your diet… How much your pudgy waistline’s been expanding—which, y’know?”

He thwacks the back of his fingers against Keith’s belly. Swats at him like Cova when he decides to smack Shiro in the nose—and a rush of pride shocks through him when that makes Keith whine. “You feel how your body’s jiggling, Baby? All that quivering flesh? Getting a big, fat paunch like that _is_ what tends to happen when you stuff your face incessantly…”

He _could_ go with his actual idea now. _Could_ give up the ghost and let it happen. But as Shiro watches Keith squirm—as he watches Keith’s body wobbling, watches Keith’s flesh refusing to calm down and quit rippling like someone’s thrown a stone into a placid lake—he decides to drag this out a little longer. Not too much longer, given the rather pressing problem between Keith’s legs. But the view is too good for Shiro to give it up just yet. Teasing Keith is simply too much fun.

Stroking down the middle of Keith’s torso, from his clavicle to his belly-button, Shiro forces himself not to smile. He drums his other hand along Keith’s side, sending smaller waves out through his chub. “I’m not giving you the chance to hide your body and _lie_ to me about flabby you’re becoming, now that you’ve quit minding what you eat… You stuff yourself rounder than a beach ball on a daily basis, Baby. Did you _seriously_ think I wouldn’t notice?”

Keith snorts, this time, and he shoots a quizzical smirk up at Shiro. He wiggles like he means to flaunt the way his belly moves—and God, but the sight of him makes Shiro struggle to keep breathing right. Without words, Keith seems to say, _“There’s a lot that you never notice, Sable. Is it my fault for thinking that you’d stay oblivious?”_

Which earns him another swift, firm smack to the middle of his belly. For all Keith fights to keep the whine pent up inside of him, he doesn’t manage it. Between that and the way he makes Keith’s pudge jiggle, Shiro allows himself to smirk. “And all that’s saying _nothing_ about how long it must’ve been since you’ve stepped foot inside a gym—”

“It’s kinda been a while, yeah, I guess?” With a self-deprecating smile, Keith quirks his shoulders—but he doesn’t blush. “I didn’t _mean_ to quit going so often… But first, I was too _busy_, and then I had the busted ribs…” He shows off all those beautiful teeth, and even while he’s looking Shiro in the eye, Keith’s cheeks don’t show the slightest hint of pink. “By the time I thought I should think about going back? I’d already put on like twenty pounds? Or maybe twenty-five—”

“And formed so many indulgent habits that you’d find yourself hard pressed to break, no doubt.” Shiro chuckles when Keith nods for him. Going for the salve and not the whip, Shiro caresses Keith’s under-belly, cups both hands along that plush curve and gives Keith a gentle squeeze. “Oh, Baby, I know. Anybody who takes a single look at you could tell exactly what your gym habits are. Sure, they’d never guess that you used to be so _skinny_ and _athletic_—not when your body’s absolutely _overflowing_ with this plump, warm flab…”

He slides his hands along Keith’s lower belly, along the chub that he refuses to tuck into his boxer-briefs. Blowing Keith a kiss, Shiro stretches one hand out on each side of his stomach. “But just because someone doesn’t _see_ you while you’re eating? Doesn’t mean that they can’t guess what an insatiable, piggy fat-boy you’ve made out of this former soccer team captain… Or that they can’t _guess_ how eagerly you’ll cram calories into your face whenever anybody leaves you unattended—”

Keith scoffs and shoots Shiro a skeptical smirk. He makes a sound like all his effort’s going into keeping himself from laughing. “I don’t even need to be alone to do that, though. I’ll have my fill whether anybody’s hanging out to judge me for that or not.”

“Oh, believe me, Baby: everyone already knows that.” He presses into Keith’s sides, making that beautiful tummy pooch out almost as much as it does when he’s sitting up. “Even if they haven’t watched you put away an entire pizza by yourself? Everybody knows that you’re fat enough to pull that off. I mean, Hell…” He pinches his whole hand around a sizable roll of chub. “With a belly like this? People who see you at a restaurant? Are probably placing bets on how quickly you can eat.”

“But I haven’t gotten _that_ fat, have I?” Keith whines in a way that’s obviously fake. Obviously playing around. Maybe his subscribers will buy it—maybe they’ll believe that he doesn’t like being confronted with his size and his weight and how much chub has moved onto the places where he used to have such tone—but Shiro sees the gleam in Keith’s eyes. He’s trying to egg Shiro on. “I don’t _feel_ like I’ve gotten all that bigger—”

“I think your _jeans_ might disagree with you about that, Baby.” Quirking both eyebrows, Shiro tugs on Keith’s fly. It’s slipped down from where he had it, and Shiro doesn’t put in _that_ much effort—but he smirks about how he fails to make the button find its hole. “I haven’t messed up any of our laundry lately, so I’m pretty sure the only answer? Is that you’ve gotten _exactly_ as fat as I’ve been saying.”

Rolling his eyes earns Keith another whack to the waistline—and God, that tight, high-pitched keening he lets slip makes Shiro’s cock threaten to get hard. He still manages not to let it, but his head’s swimming so much that he only barely makes out Keith’s protest: “Okay, I’ve _obviously_ put on a little bit of weight. I _know_ that. I’ve _admitted_ it. But you’re making it sound like I’m some huge, enormous fat-ass… Like my _thigh_ is thicker than your waistline, or like I’m bigger than a house, or something that’s just—”

“Oh no, Akira, you haven’t gotten _that_ big—not yet, anyway.” Smirking, Shiro jostles Keith’s pudge. “But if you keep going like you have been lately? Keep stuffing yourself and lazing around, and if you _really_ give it time? Then I bet you anything, you’ll get there.” He traces his fingers over the dips and curves of Keith’s plush midsection, drawing a lopsided circle around Keith’s belly-button. “Your thighs could post up my entire waistline before Christmas even gets here.”

Keith screws up his face as if he means to argue again—but then he wrinkles his nose. He blinks at the hand down on his tummy, then at the space between his thighs and Shiro’s backside. Looking at how Shiro hovers over him, Keith puckers his lips like he’s sucking on an invisible lemon. But when he meets Shiro’s eyes again, there’s a glimmer of recognition behind his smile.

There’s an eager edge to it, besides. Like he’s finally realized that Shiro has a game afoot and he wants to see what it’s gonna be. God, that expression makes an impulse spark up inside of Shiro’s rib-cage. Now’s the time to bring this to fruition—as soon as he eases them into what he’s planned.

Abandoning Keith’s belly, Shiro stretches out. Works a crick out of his back, then another from his neck. Without looking away from Keith’s chubby cheeks and the glimmer in his eyes, Shiro rubs down on Keith’s thighs—but only to let Keith know where Shiro has his body. He doesn’t wait too long before he’s back to hovering over Keith. Watching his face with a knowing smile and trying not to falter when Keith pulls a face, looking so perplexed that he might as well be lost without a map.

Slithering at thin air, Shiro means to tease: Keith can see his abs and hip-bones, while the cameras have a good view of his back. He can’t keep his Baby waiting for too long, just long enough to make Keith wonder if anything is actually gonna happen… Just long enough to make Keith frown impatiently and start sulking like a kitten who’d much prefer a bowl of cream to his serving of the dry and crunchy cat food…

Letting out a sigh, Shiro flops onto Keith’s thighs.

He can’t ruffle Keith as well as Keith can him; he doesn’t have that kind of weight to throw around. But he’s still heavy enough that the impact makes Keith’s midsection tremble, shaking like a jello mold stuck in an earthquake. The ripples wash through Keith’s flesh, and right when they start calming down, Shiro drops onto Keith’s thighs again. Although his body once more jiggles oh so well for Shiro—although every pudgy roll of fat wobbles like it might never stop and there’s no way that Keith isn’t feeling it—Keith refuses to give in and let himself blush. Even a third round of this only barely makes him flinch.

After that, Shiro decides to rest there on Keith’s lap. He leans down closer to him, clenching his legs tight around Keith’s hips. When the ripples start slowing down and Keith’s flesh begins to still, Shiro cups his hands around the sides of Keith’s stomach. Pinching and pushing into his flab so gently that it’s practically another tease, Shiro grinds his hips on Keith’s.

“You’re trying to tell me that you can’t feel this, Baby?” He blows Keith another kiss, gives his beautiful tummy a jostle that he should barely feel—but it makes his midsection ripple _so well_. “You honestly can’t feel how you’ve _really_ gotten fat?”

“Yeah, I know, I mean… You’re probably right, Sable…” Squirming, Keith lets himself blush bright pink. Tries to curl in on himself and can’t, not really. Not with all his extra padding in the way, and definitely not with Shiro bearing down on him. “About how big I’m getting, I mean? But… You could be right about whether or not I could ever lose it, too… If I were ever so _inclined_…”

“Oh, I _know_ I’m right about that, Baby.” Shiro huffs softly, brushing the mess of black bangs off Keith’s forehead. Cupping Keith’s puffy jawline in his hand, he tuts sympathetically. “D’you want to know what I’m really wondering, though?”

Keith sighs, an exhausted sound that’s twice as heavy as his belly. When he worms around beneath of Shiro, his motions are long and slow, as if he can’t summon the energy for the frenetic squirming that he’s thrown in Shiro’s face before. He spreads his legs, rubbing all of their flab along the muscle that Shiro’s built up on his own—and the pout that he turns up to Shiro comes with a look so starry-eyed that, if not for the cameras and if not for how he knows better, Shiro might almost mistake it for adoration. For _love_.

Not the sort of love that they’ve always had between them—the warm, affectionate platonic love that they settled into shortly after they first met and have never seen fit to recover from—but the romantic sort that’s made Shiro’s lungs decide to incubate red azaleas when no other love in his life has ever managed to strike him down with Hanahaki. If Shiro weren’t Shiro and Keith weren’t Keith—if they were anyone else and Shiro weren’t acutely aware of how much better Keith could do than slumming it with him—then the gooey, longing look behind Keith’s eyes would be exactly the sort of besotted, bodice-ripper nonsense that Shiro’s always read about and known that he will never get to have for real.

Either way, Keith sells the expression well enough that his clients will probably get hot from it. More importantly, he keeps writhing under Shiro—keeps jostling his own stomach, wiggling his own chub, and making his own rolls of flab bulge and pooch out from the rest of him with each hypnotic, devastating motion—and that’s what the subscribers _really_ pay him for. Up on the headboard, the extra cameras must be getting quite the show. Depending on how the finished clip turns out, Keith might even decide that parts of this could be sold separately for an extra charge. He _deserves_ that, for all the work he’s putting in, for how beautiful he is and how well he works this moment.

Maybe Shiro can’t appreciate Keith’s performance properly, not while he’s fighting to smother the chill that’s spreading through his chest. But he can’t deny what’s real: Keith is enjoying himself right now and it makes him look more beautiful than he always does.

“I don’t know what you’re really wondering,” Keith acquiesces when he finally decides to give it a rest. “Guess you should just _tell_ me.”

Shiro coughs, trying to remember how to use his voice. “I’m just, like? I’m wondering how you can be lying here and listening to me tell you what the truth of your situation is… How you can feel my muscle up against your chub…” Shiro’s mouth is off on autopilot, and his body follows suit, snaking his abs along Keith’s pudgy torso. “How you can be face-to-face with what a _pig _you are, with how much weight you’ve gained since giving in to your inner glutton, and keep on smiling like you have no idea what the issue is?”

Following an impulse, Shiro leans down closer. Pulls his core tighter than necessary, so Keith can feel that much more muscle bearing down on his warm, soft chub. Locking eyes with Keith, Shiro combs his hands through Keith’s hair. Brushes his bangs off his face, then musses his long fingers through whatever he can get at without making Keith lift his head. Tutting softly, he cups one hand around Keith’s chubby cheek. Wide-eyed, Keith swallows thickly. He flutters his eyelashes, but it seems more like he’s blinking too much and too quickly. A reflex, just like the way Keith’s cheeks go pink, and not deliberate, like the way that Shiro grinds his hips on Keith, the way he drags his ass along Keith’s crotch in long, slow motions, or the way he ruts at Keith, nudging his abs against Keith’s

With a soft, keening noise, Keith shakes his head. “What _is_ the issue? I can’t… What is it?”

“Oh, come on, Baby. Don’t play those kinds of games with me.” Shiro keeps his face as neutral as he can while every fiber of his being yearns for so much more than he can have. Sniffing dismissively, he jiggles one of Keith’s breasts, then squeezes on it—_hard. _Hard enough to make Keith whine, and God, but it’s near impossible to keep from lighting up when he makes that noise. “You might be getting _fat_, but I know that you know that _I know_ that you aren’t _stupid_.”

Shiro chuckles. He bucks on Keith and makes Keith’s tummy bounce beneath him. This makes Keith mewl and Shiro can’t rightly tell if that’s a sound of getting too much or one of wanting more. But Keith has a glimmer in his eyes that makes Shiro’s heart thrash against his rib-cage, trying to break free of the confines of his body. Looking down at Keith, at the way he’s curling up his face, Shiro can feel his mind trying to white out on him. Can feel his thoughts getting tangled up in each other, trying to slip through his fingers, away into some unknown ether. Whatever it means, that _Look_ sends a rush of heat shocking through Shiro’s veins.

Whatever Keith wants to get across to Shiro—no, wait, to his _subscribers_; they’re the ones he’s _actually_ performing for—he’s a tease about it. There’s one moment—one brief, flash of _something_ that spasms across Keith’s face—and it almost makes Shiro worry that Keith might be worrying. But instead of giving him room to dwell on that, Keith jabs his hips up into Shiro. He knocks his crotch against the firm curve of Shiro’s backside with an agonized sound like he’s going crazy, holding out on himself for so long, denying himself something that he must want badly. Bucking at him only makes him play up his angle, makes him twitch and twist and jerk around the mattress, trying to meet Shiro’s thrusts as much as possible.

They don’t find a rhythm together, not exactly—but not for lack of trying, on Keith’s part. Not for lack of him snaking around beneath Shiro, pouting up at him like something’s wrong—more likely for Shiro than for Keith himself—and so help him, Keith desperately wants to fix it.

Well, that won’t do at all. It could too easily turn into Keith tying himself up in concern for problems that he doesn’t need to worry over. Pursing his lips, Shiro smacks Keith’s stomach. Right on the side with a good, firm _thwack!_—which he regrets immediately. Not only does the impact make Keith’s flesh shake, it also makes Keith inhale sharply. Makes him screw up his face—eyes closed, head rolling back as his hips roll up, front teeth burying themselves into his lip—and makes him sigh out a tight-wound, spine-chilling noise that makes the hairs stand up on the back of Shiro’s neck.

He’s trying to keep himself together, trying not to get distracted, when Keith snorts and jerks him back into the moment. “What was that, Babe,” he deadpans. “Sorry, Sable, I know that you were saying _something_, but I didn’t really catch it?”

“Oh, you didn’t?” Shiro wrinkles his nose and furrows his brow. But all this accomplishes is getting Keith to pout and shake his head. “Well, you ought to listen to me better, huh? Pay more attention to what I’m showing you. You never know… Something that I say could be _important_.”

Which isn’t fair, not really. Or it wouldn’t be, not if Keith and Shiro were speaking as themselves. Of everyone who matters in Shiro’s life, Keith’s one of the only ones who’s bothered listening to him, lately. At least, one of the only ones who’ve listened in any _meaningful_ fashion.

But Keith doesn’t seem to be smarting over that. If anything, the way he wriggles seems like he hasn’t connected those words to objective reality at all. The way he grins strikes Shiro as the look of a guy who has exactly what he wants right in the palm of his hand, but has to play with it before he can go all the way in on anything. As he winds and writhes underneath of Shiro, Keith shifts one of his legs, edges one of those chunky thighs into Shiro’s ass. His grin widens and his dimples go even deeper, just from watching Shiro rock back into him, trying to cop a feel of that thick, cushy, trembling flesh.

Hoping that Keith _means _for that to be a request for more—hoping that he wasn’t kidding about how much he wanted to mix in impact play—Shiro sits up straighter. Stifles the sigh as he pulls away from Keith’s leg because there are bigger things to go after and if Keith keeps him as a costar, he can always attend to Keith’s blubbery, padded, flab-bejeweled thighs later. Whenever they have more time for him to give them their proper due, and kiss them all over, and suck on the skin until Keith feels his hickeys more acutely than the way his chub scrapes up on chub with every step he takes. They’ll have more time for that, if Keith will keep him. They’ll have time for him to worship Keith’s perfect thighs as well as they deserve.

Shifting closer to Keith’s lap, so he can have a better angle, Shiro pushes Keith’s legs back down to the mattress. He gives Keith a warm, fond smile, ghosting his fingertips down the soft, plush curve of Keith’s side—then, he rears back and slaps Keith’s belly with a full, open hand. All of that beautiful flesh starts wobbling again, ripples shivering through it from the point of impact. Before it can calm down and start to settle, Shiro takes another crack at Keith, at his beautiful, plush belly with all of its inviting flab.

Gasping, Keith writhes like he’s gotten hit with an electric shock. He groans, but not until knocking his hips up into Shiro makes his cock slam up at Shiro’s ass. All his twisting makes his belly-fat move even more. Even once Keith drops back to the mattress, his mass of squishy chub wobbles as if he’s still squirming, and it shakes like Shiro’s caress is just another smack, and it quivers in a way that makes Shiro sit there, hypnotized, mouth open and eyes bulging, ghosting his touch along Keith’s side as something hot and sick and _hungry_ wriggles through the pit of his own stomach with a too-palpable burn of _need-fuck-now-_**_want_**.

“Think you’re getting the message yet, Baby?” Shiro snarls at Keith shaking his head and pouting like a spoiled brat. Deeper inside his chest, he can’t help envying the way that Keith stays so immersed in the scene—how he can so fully inhabit his character as Akira—but _Sable_ wouldn’t let that appreciation show, right now.

Sable would do what Shiro drags himself through doing: he would give up an impatient sigh, and drum his fingertips along Keith’s pudgy side, and let Keith whine at him about how his point still makes no sense. Once Keith’s moved on to wordless sniffling, Sable would pull his hand away and press his fingers close together. He’d wait for Keith to still and look him in the eye. Then, with Keith lying there—so open and vulnerable beneath him, sticking to his back without being pinned there, keeping his hands away from Shiro’s body without having them restrained or tied to anything, furrowing his brow and grinning with a mix of confusion, glee, and unmistakable anticipation—Sable would make sure that his wrist is ready…

Holding onto Keith’s gaze like a life-preserver, Shiro smiles down at him like he doesn’t have a plan in mind. He takes a deep breath, ready to put in everything he has so Keith can get what he deserves. Without a word, he gives Keith and his belly the hardest, sharpest smack that he can manage.

With a _thwack! _that’s louder than a firecracker, Shiro’s hand blows at Keith’s belly. He swallows his own sounds as kickback pain shocks up his arm. Maybe it’s uncomfortable—but the focus here should be on Keith. Should be on the way that the impact hits his belly, the way his flab quivers from the slap, then jiggles all the more when Keith can’t make himself hold still. His future audience shouldn’t need to tune out the way Keith’s worming makes Shiro whine, so Shiro doesn’t afford himself that privilege. The clip needs to focus on the tight, keening notes that come through in Keith’s gasping, and on the whimper that comes out of Keith’s mouth next, wobbling like his belly.

The ball’s in Keith’s court, after that. They didn’t talk about an actual procedure for slapping him like this, or any of their limits for going to a place like this. In silence, Shiro slips back into Keith’s lap and ducks his chin. His heartbeat’s racing, pounding on. His lungs flutter around his chest like a pair of butterflies who’ve gone out and gotten blackout drunk, and now they’re making several questionable life choices that they’re going to regret, come morning. His head’s awash with heat and swamped down in a mixed up, humid fume of things that Shiro can’t pick out, much less identify—save knowing that he isn’t feeling this way because of the way Keith’s belly looks or the way his body jiggles.

He should have something to say to Keith about this—he should be the one who’s keeping the scene between them grounded so Keith can enjoy himself more freely—but all Shiro has is the vague, looming sense of _something bad_ that kicks him in the teeth as he tries to rein his heartbeat in. He recognizes the things that he’s been saying, he _knows_ he does. Just like he _knows_ that there’s something deeper going on with the way he’s smacked Keith’s belly. _Why_ these things feel so familiar insistently escapes him—but Shiro _knows_ the answer’s there for him, crouching at the doorway, lurking and refusing to pounce on him already—

“So, is the point that you can smack me like an artist,” Keith prods, rolling his hips up into Shiro. “Because you could’ve _told_ me that upfront, y’know… And I’m just saying, Sable?” Wearing a playful smirk, he looks up at Shiro through those long, thick lashes. “You could _keep_ on doing that… I’d be _all about that_, pretty much.”

“How could you be all about it, Baby? We both _know_ what you’re _really_ all about.”

Keith makes a throaty noise of protest, and Shiro’s impulses take the lead again. Leaning right up close to Keith’s face—kneading his abs into Keith’s warm, plush, yielding belly and grinning at the way it squishes as he presses into it—grinding on Keith’s crotch and teasing his erection, Shiro hisses wordlessly against his skin. There’s more than ample give around Keith’s middle, and if he’s gonna argue, then Shiro has to prove him wrong. He has to _show_ that Keith has gotten bigger, softer, fatter, plumper. He has to make it so Keith can’t deny this anymore. He has to bear down on Keith and force his flab to billow out along his sides in thick, soft rolls, moving to make room for Shiro on Keith’s torso.

As Shiro writhes on Keith, he can’t find the words he wants and instead tries to make him feel how much smaller Shiro’s waistline is than his, how much firmer his abs are than Keith’s belly, how his hip-bones jut, straining the tawny skin just beneath the low-riding waistband of his jeans. As he thrusts down into Keith’s paunch, Shiro stays so close that Keith’s flab doesn’t have a chance to jiggle and he clamps his thighs around Keith’s hips so tightly that he could leave both of them with bruises. As he rides an upward jerk and bats Keith’s hips back into the mattress, Shiro kisses the apple of Keith’s cheek.

“I could slap you harder than I did,” he swears, voice low and hot and heavy, “and you’d be thinking about _food_.”

Shaking his head with a _nuh-uh_, Keith squirms, urges his hips up at Shiro like he’s begging to get forced back again.

“Don’t _lie_ to me, I’m not an _idiot_.” Once he has Keith prone and flattened out, he writhes against Keith’s belly in a long, slow, unforgiving motion. His abs knead hard into Keith’s paunch, rolling around in that supple flab and making it pooch out everywhere that Shiro pressed down on hardest. “I could put all of myself into slapping your big, fat gut _exactly_ how you want. I could follow your every wish—whatever specifications you wanted most—and I could get my hands all over your luscious flab, and I could smack your belly better than anyone has _ever_ slapped you around before. I could give you _everything _for that, Akira…”

Stretching his back, Shiro rolls down Keith’s torso, pecs against Keith’s breasts, abs against Keith’s belly, hips against Keith’s hips, and erection right up against Keith’s hot, straining erection. Keith writhes beneath him, whines like that contact could make him unravel right here and now—but all it takes to make him steel himself is one thrust on his hips and one tutting click of Shiro’s tongue. Sure, Keith’s face scrunches up with the effort and he gnaws at his lip like holding off on what he wants might start genuinely hurting him—but he looks up at Shiro with a ready, daring gleam behind his eyes.

Whatever Keith’s really feeling, that look of his screams, _“Hit me with your best shot, this is good and I can take it.”_

“It doesn’t _matter_ what I gave you, though.” Nestling against Keith’s chest and stomach, Shiro teases a nuzzle along his pudgy cheek. “No matter what I put into slapping you, all you’d ever think about is _eating_. About shoving food that you don’t need into your face as though you haven’t gotten big enough already. About opening yourself up like a garbage disposal and stuffing calorie after fatty, disgusting calorie into this belly, until you feel like you’re about to burst, because let’s face it…”

Shiro eases himself up slowly, peeling himself off of Keith’s skin and hoping that he _feels_ the absence. _Feels_ the way that his flesh shifts around as Shiro pulls away from him. God, he gives up such a beautiful, heart-wrenching little whimper—but Shiro wants Keith to feel the lack of him as clearly as he feels Shiro’s hand along his face.

Looking him in the eye, Shiro squeezes Keith’s pudgy cheek and tells him, “Skinny athletes don’t become flabby, plumped up pigs like you’ve done overnight. And they don’t balloon themselves with chub like you’ve done unless they give up all _hope_ of self-control.”

Shiro snickers so coldly that it sends a shiver up his own spine. His lips curl into a sneer that feels completely alien on his face. But Keith’s squirming for him so expectantly—spelling out a universe’s worth of craving on his face, from the gleam in his eyes to the way his dimples dig into his face when he grins—and Shiro cannot afford to let him down. They’ve gotten so far into this clip already, and Keith _trusts_ him. Shiro cannot slip up and he _cannot_ allow himself to fail. Not even Keith whining and wriggling under him can distract him from his purpose.

“I’m only telling you the facts, Akira. You wouldn’t have gotten chunky if you’d lifted a finger to stop yourself.” With a faux-exhausted sigh, Shiro traces his fingers down Keith’s cheek, his neck, his chest. He rests his hand at the place where Keith’s belly starts to bulge out from his middle. “You wouldn’t have turned into such a jiggling, puffed up chubbo if you hadn’t _wanted _it.”

Although Keith ruts up at him, Shiro huffs and keeps his lips twisted up. Not a neutral expression, but not betraying the way his heart is pounding, either. With a dry, cold laugh, he bucks on Keith and smirks even harder when when this makes Keith’s belly wobble. That pale flesh begs for somebody to grope it, shaking all over and trembling as much as the keening sound that Keith can’t hold back. There are probably all kinds of reasons why Shiro _shouldn’t_, not right now—but he grabs up Keith’s lower roll of belly-fat. Squishes both of his hands into that soft, pale flab and digs into it until Keith whines for him.

Experienced in putting on a show, in playing up what people want to see, Keith rolls his head around the pillow as if he’s ready to have someone inside him. As if waiting for release is killing him. The way he scrunches up his face makes Shiro believe that Keith’s getting uncomfortable—until Keith shimmies around beneath him, jerking his hips and bumping his chub against the palm that Shiro’s resting on his side. Beautiful to watch, as ever, and each time Keith’s stomach knocks into him, Shiro has to fight himself to keep from gasping or dropping character.

He’d hold Keith’s tummy and watch the way moves all day, if he could get away with it.

But for now, he contents himself with baring his teeth in a grin. “Mhmmm, you feel the way your belly shakes?” As if Keith needs reminding, Shiro taps that sweet, soft, bouncing flesh. “Never would’ve done that a few months ago, would you? Back when you were skinny and you could still fit into these jeans?” When Keith rolls his eyes, Shiro gives him a shrug. “Oh, but look at you now. All that eating’s taken its toll on your figure, hasn’t it? Stuffing yourself sick with pizza, cupcakes, mac and cheese. Chugging milkshakes like you _should _be drinking water. Daily pints of ice cream, _plural_—what did you _think_ was gonna happen, Baby?”

Even though all of those accusations are at best exaggerated, Keith sulks as if he deserves to hear them. “I didn’t get _fat_. I just get _hungry_—”

“Why _wouldn’t_ you? With a whopping, porky gut like this—” Shiro pinches up a thick roll of chub and jostles it so hard, he makes Keith gasp. “You must be hungry all the time. Always ravenous, always so certain that you’re starving—_especially_ when you’ve just gone and _gorged_ yourself with food. Which is exactly what I’ve tried to tell you.” Keith’s belly-flab quivers as Shiro lets it drop, and Shiro can feel his whole face lighting up at the way Keith groans. “You’ve let yourself go, and you’ve indulged yourself too much because you have no self-control, and now?”

Shiro clicks his tongue, narrows his eyes, pretends to be sizing Keith up. “All your swollen, chubby chickens are coming home to roost, Akira, and they’re fatter than they ever dreamed of getting—just. Like. _You_.” Shiro punctuates the last three words with three thrusts, jerking against the lowest curve of Keith’s belly and making him shake. Trying not to look too sweet, Shiro pats Keith’s stomach with a smirk. “Who’d’ve thought the old star of the soccer team had such a bloated fat-boy pent up inside him, waiting to break free?”

Heaving a deep breath with more force than necessary, Keith smirks right back at him in a way that Shiro can’t interpret. It’s not warm but it’s not cold either, and the gleam behind Keith’s eyes makes his face even more illegible. There’s an edge to his expression, something greedy and longing makes something hot lurch in the pit of his stomach. Something flares up in his chest, and he _knows_ he can’t let that impulse have control. He keeps his breathing deep and slow, because he _cannot_ slip up or let things get out of hand—but Keith rocks up into him, and drags himself on Shiro’s backside, and his belly jiggles as he drops back to the mattress—

Nothing works. Not anymore. None of Shiro’s meditative interventions get him anywhere. All of his cock’s threats to get hard finally come to fruition and as Shiro swallows down a moan, it feels like he’s having his face rubbed in this betrayal from his own body. In his own loss of self-control and how it only took Keith being such a beautiful, perfect, pudgy, jiggling, chunky _tease_. In the face of how he tried so hard to keep himself restrained, but in the end lost out because Keith’s letting himself get fat and _knows_ it, and Shiro can’t quell his urges when he’s got Keith chub right here underneath of him, all up close and personal.

Part of Shiro argues that he can’t be blamed, not really. Keith’s moving against him like he’s desperate to get nailed to the mattress, and after slapping him around, the way that Shiro did? After making himself play such a harder angle and making himself hold back as Keith’s body reacted, as his hips jerked and the ripples went through his flesh and his flesh wobbled in a way that made Shiro’s mouth go dry? It’s only fitting that he slipped up on _something_. Why _wouldn’t _that something be his cock and keeping it on lock-down?

That’s not the worst of this problem, either. Between Keith’s eyes and his mouth—between the way he’s playing up his breathing, acting like it takes more effort than it does, and the way he moans when Shiro kneads his abs against that tummy—Shiro cannot be long for this world. If he doesn’t outright die, then he’s going to screw up in some unknown way that Keith won’t be able to miss. He’ll spot Shiro’s weakness easily—he’ll spot the signs that Shiro is here for more than simply playing Sable, that he wants to be something more to Keith than a convenient costar—and then everything will go to Hell.

Which can’t happen, not today or ever. Shiro cannot let it come to pass. Aside from how they’ve come so far in this shoot already—aside from how Keith will probably rake in more than he expected from parceling off pieces of this clip to be sold as side-pieces—Shiro can’t afford to lose Keith because he didn’t maintain control enough to keep his dick in line, then lost himself even further because he _wanted_ something more than he deserved.

He fidgets under Shiro’s ass—again, his belly shifts from side to side with every motion, so soft and fluid in the way it moves, going back and forth, nothing about it firm or rigid like Keith’s middle used to be, only pudge and flesh and all of that inviting plumpness—and he doesn’t go still until Shiro reams him back into the mattress. He doesn’t give up on moving until Shiro makes their hips collide with so much force and weight behind it that Keith’s own body curls up into the impact. Grinding his firm ass down on Keith’s erection, Shiro swallows the moan that strains his throat like it’s going to defeat him and make itself heard.

Thankfully, Shiro doesn’t let his reactions win the day. He only gives up a sigh and it sure comes out sounding like he’s actually exasperated. He hopes. But before he can worry about it too much, his hands decide to cup themselves around the fullest, biggest, plumpest part of Keith’s belly. Shiro’s fingers splay out like spider-legs and he’s oh so gentle about working them on that round, soft mass of flesh. About massaging Keith’s stomach as if it’s the most precious thing in the universe because it’s very high up Shiro’s list indeed, bested only by Keith’s face, Keith’s eyes, and Keith himself, as a whole person.

This is good. Not only is it beautiful, the sight of Keith wriggling like this and the sound of his ravenous, burning little moans—but it's also the perfect way for Shiro to shift them back where they're supposed to be. Lifting his hips just enough to give himself more room to work, Shiro curls his fingertips up in the waistband of Keith’s jeans. He instructs Keith to pick himself up a little, then jerks the denim back up where Keith had gotten it before. Keith groans, face spasming with a mix of pain and pleasure—probably because Shiro tugging the jeans back up put Keith’s cock in an even tighter position than his boxer-briefs already have—but Shiro didn’t need to pull the jeans up _that_ far.

Not that the narrowest part of Keith’s midsection is really _that_ much better than the fuller places where his stomach sags and jiggles and slobs around in all its flabby glory. There’s still so much beguiling fat that, until recently, Shiro only _dreamed_ that Keith would ever have. Even so close to the place where Keith’s belly starts to blossom—where there’s a dip in his figure before the curves begin, sloping down in all of that easy, jiggling, soft, inviting plumpness—Shiro gives the waistband an experimental tug and can’t make the button get into the hole. He quirks his eyebrow down at Keith, who hunches his shoulders, throws his entire body into pouting up at Shiro like he can’t believe that Shiro would _dare_ to point out how big his belly’s getting.

“You know you only have one person you can blame if you have to trash these jeans.” Shiro huffs and pats Keith right above the belly-button. He smiles at the easy ripple that he sends throughout Keith’s flesh. “It’s not like anybody else swooped in and _made_ you choke down enough food to sustain a family of four. I might _love_ to watch you go at entire twelve-slice pizzas all by your pretty little lonesome—but you could’ve refused at any moment. You could’ve said _no_, if you didn’t really want those excess calories. You could’ve shored up your resolve and told me that you didn’t want to keep on eating, and I would’ve backed off and left it be.”

Strictly speaking, their most recent clip before this one might call that claim into question.

But Akira and Sable don’t need to have a through-line that stays consistent between videos. Each new one tells a new story to Keith’s subscribers—and in this story, Sable would never force-feed Akira, not even in the soft, suggestive way that they did last time.

With one last parting shot, Shiro cops a feel of Keith’s belly-fat. Squeezes it gently—then drops it so he can pick Keith’s jeans up again. “I’m just saying, Baby. It doesn’t matter how much I like to watch you eat because _I’m _not the one who made you stuff your greedy face, the way you did. And _I’m _not the one who made you choke down all that food.” Tugging on the waistband, he drawls, “The only person you can blame if your jeans don’t fit? Is_ yourself_.”

Keith whines without a word, shutting his eyes and turning his face away like he can’t bear to hear what Shiro’s saying. Guilt clamps down on Shiro’s heart, sends another chill jolting through his veins—_oh, no_.

What if he pushed too hard with all this name-calling and these insults?

What if he went too far?

Keith hasn’t tried to use his safe-words yet tonight—he hasn’t even called a _yellow_—but Shiro’s going in hard and maybe harder than is necessary. There’s still a possibility that Shiro messed things up with Keith, and crossed a line, and _really_ hurt him without meaning to—

But Keith must sense that Shiro’s wavering. Turning that wide-eyed, quivery pout on Shiro one more time, almost managing to look completely innocent, he rolls his hips up into Shiro’s ass. His erection rubs up hard on Shiro’s muscle and Keith’s keening, longing noise claws its way out of him, fighting past the breath that hitches in his throat.

Once Keith’s lying flat again, Shiro resume tugging on the waistband of his jeans. Even with the extra give that Shiro has up here, he grunts and sighs and stretches the denim as hard as he can pull, until he could swear that he hears the thread straining and tearing because Keith’s belly is simply too, _too _much for this fabric to contain. When he lets the sides of Keith’s fly go, they practically groan. For his part, Shiro isn’t sure if they flop down due to gravity or if they’re being crumpled by Keith’s protruding, pudgy, plumped up belly.

God, he wants to give the scene a miss and get his hands all over Keith’s body—but that’s not happening because they have a job to do, right now. Heatedly, Shiro sighs and glares up at one of the cameras on the headboard. Sure, he’s exasperated with himself and not with Keith, but nobody else needs to know that. Part of him hopes that Keith can tell—or at the very least, that Keith isn’t truly taking anything that Shiro’s said to heart—but as far as Keith’s subscribers are concerned? Sable’s grimace is entirely because Akira’s jeans obviously don’t fit him anymore, while Akira refuses to admit to this.

Shaking his head and rolling his eyes, Shiro grabs up the sides of Keith’s fly. They might not make the button meet the hole on this attempt, but he needs to stop letting go of things. Needs to stop dragging them down. He hesitates, drumming his fingertips along the denim, but he puts that moment to use and narrows his eyes at Keith as if he _actually_ finds all Keith’s chub revolting. As if Keith’s extra weight strikes him as a desecration of Keith’s beauty, as if he’s ruined a priceless work of art by letting himself go and plumping up so much. As if he can see straight through into the deepest, darkest reaches of Keith’s soul and _knows_ that he’s only going to let himself get even bigger—and as if he can’t stand the thought of that.

Something about the way that Shiro’s face twists up feels familiar, impossibly so, and in the same way that so many of the insults that he’s flung tonight have definitely come to him from _somewhere_. The identity of that somewhere still escapes him. He could get his fingers on the muscle that might be lurking underneath Keith’s flab more easily than he can get a grip on any hints about what’s going on.

But the scene doesn’t let Shiro lose track of what his task is. _Keith_ doesn’t let Shiro drift off on him too badly, bucking his hips before Shiro can get completely up his own head and wrapped up in a mental labyrinth of his own making. Shiro doubles down on glaring at him, which makes Keith try to set his jaw. Despite the resolve gleaming in his eyes, he ends up audibly gulping. Writhing like he can’t decide if he wants to get away or not, he swallows thickly and curls in on himself as much as he can. He mutters something—and when Shiro demands that he repeat it, Keith sighs as if that’s asking too much of him.

Whether it is or not, he acquiesces, “I _said_, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be _helping me_ with something?’”

Shiro sniffs. “In a way, isn’t that _exactly_ what I’m doing by making you confront every squishy, bulging ounce of _this_?” Rather than letting Keith’s fly go, Shiro jerks the fabric back and forth. It makes Keith’s belly jiggle—makes his breasts bounce and his entire torso slosh around until his flesh starts to look like something liquid—and Shiro curls his mouth into the hardest smirk that he can manage. “You won’t get _anything_ out of denying the truth about your body. By trying to pretend that you’ve become anything but a bloated, fatty butterball, with your belly straining everything that you have left to wear.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” Keith tries to deadpan, even though his voice comes out trembling even more than his flabby stomach. He struggles to put on a smirk, and when Shiro yanks on the jeans again, Keith lets slip a noise that sounds suspiciously like _eep!_—but he makes himself meet Shiro’s eye while telling him, “I’ll believe it when you _prove _to me that these jeans don’t fit. So, put up or shut up, Pretty Boy.”

Shiro’s heart twirls around like a drunk girl at a party, fluttering over Keith’s choice of epithet.

Not that it’s a new one or that Keith’s never thrown it out at him like this before. But today, those two simple words—_“Pretty Boy”_—cut through, past the veneer of Sable, and send a shock of something warm, and _soft_, and inexplicably quite **_pink_** flushing through Shiro’s chest. There’s something palpably different about how Keith said them—about how he purred those syllables so delicately, while batting his eyelashes and rolling his hips underneath of Shiro’s ass—and that something makes Shiro feel like—

_Oh, my God. Does Keith _**_really_**_ think I’m pretty? Or is Akira just saying that_ _to rattle Sable’s_—

And, no. Not right now. Shiro shakes his head, quick and hard, then turns an arctic glare on Keith.

“I _can’t _put up or shut up, if your belly insists on forcing your fly apart.” A deep breath. A sigh like a particularly exasperated teacup. A sneer down at the eager little grin Keith’s wearing—then, Shiro tugs on the waistband again and pointedly tries not to notice the way that Keith’s belly jiggles from the force. “Suck in for me already, if you expect us to get anywhere in this exercise.”

Nodding like he genuinely intends to behave himself, Keith takes a deep breath of his own—but he barely pulls his belly back enough to notice. He_ definitely_ hasn’t made enough room for Shiro to work, much less get the button fastened. Even so, Keith gives Shiro an expectant, painfully earnest-looking smile, as if he’s doing his full best and ready to get praise for it.

Shiro lets his shoulders droop. “_Honestly_, Akira? You can do so much better for me than this.”

But Keith doesn’t relent, so Shiro shakes his head and tugs. Naturally, he doesn’t make any progress. _Maybe_ the button gets a little closer to the hole, but with the way that pulling the fly closer together makes Keith’s belly jiggle, it’s hard for Shiro to tell. Holding that breath makes Keith whine and squirm like Shiro doesn’t _know_ that Keith has a knack for inhaling without letting anybody know. But that’s a part of the show, he guesses, so he clicks his tongue by way telling Keith to let go and breathe already.

The breath explodes out of Keith in a sigh. This shoves his stomach out at Shiro and the air around them. Makes it jump up in a pale, wobbling swell like it’s escaping from too long in an especially tiny cage. In a sense, that isn’t too far from the truth—and it’s going to be truer of the situation still, once they manage to get these pants done up.

As Shiro waits and tries to look impatient, Keith heaves his way through trying to catching his breath, playing up each inhale and each exhale, making them seem harder than they are for him to catch. Eyes shut and throat periodically letting slip a tight-wound, longing sound that’s downright obscene, Keith uses his diaphragm like that singer’s technique Allura taught him. It expands his belly so much more. Each breath stretches out Keith’s middle like he’s swallowed a balloon, like he keeps inflating and deflating it.

Every time he lets a breath back out again, his belly flops back into place, goes all yielding, soft, and flabby with the wind let out of it so gracelessly. If Shiro was an artist with his smacks, then he has no idea what Keith’s being, flaunting all his paunch like this. Surely, _“artist” _does not go far enough. God, but Shiro’s cock aches, each time Keith lets out a breath and his belly wobbles as if somebody’s tapping on it. _God_, but he can feel his pulse beating in his shaft when Keith shuffles along the mattress, moaning as he rubs his erection against the curve of Shiro’s ass, and makes his belly bounce up and down in a long, slow wobble that makes Shiro struggle to keep breathing.

And _holy _**_God_** _Almighty_, it is _borderline impossible_ to keep himself from whining as he sits here on Keith’s hips, watching the squishy, loose, beguiling fat around his belly jiggle like a bowl of melted ice cream.

Watching Keith make his belly slosh like that, Shiro makes a mental note that they should _try_ a melted ice cream binge sometime, if Keith ever takes a shine to the idea. It may not be the most _glamorous_ way to get a ton of calories and sugar into him—but letting the ice cream melt a bit will make it easier for Keith to load himself down with more of it. He’ll be able to fit more into his belly and get more progress from that stuffing.

Back before Shiro slimmed down, he could forget himself, forget what diet he was trying this time all for want of cravings, and put away three melted pints of Ben and Jerry’s in a single sitting. With Keith actually _wanting_ to do things like that—with him loving his size and weight, and being _dedicated _to getting even bigger—surely he could show Shiro up without even trying all that hard. Depending on how much else he ate before they tried it, Keith could no doubt manage four pints easy, five pints with a little bit of effort, and six pints with more struggle but without letting anybody see him sweat.

Even thinking about that makes Shiro’s stomach twist and turn around itself like when Rover chases his own tail. The knots of arousal welling up must be absolutely Gordian, and there’s a pressure in the pit of Shiro’s chest like he will burst himself wide open if he isn’t careful. Keith doesn’t help, burrowing into his mattress and making his entire torso tremble, moaning like someone’s actually inside him while he does so either because he wants to keep Shiro grounded, or because he’s too wrapped up in the scene himself and he’s in the sort of mindset where jiggling his fat _does _feel as good for him as getting fucked.

Thankfully, he stops it with this breathing thing when Shiro jostles him by the jeans again.

“Let’s try this again, Tubby, if you think you’re _ready_ for it.” Shiro tugs on Keith’s fly by way of showing what he means. “I won’t get your jeans fastened at all if you don’t focus on the task and _help_ me.” He huffs, flips his white fringe back off his face. “Now, I want you to suck in for me again—but suck in like you _mean it_, this time.”

Quirking an eyebrow as Keith nods for him, Shiro hopes that his face looks as cold as his voice sounds, that he isn’t betraying the whole façade by making any faces that The Gang would call too soft, too earnest, too painfully in love with Keith to dominate him, the way that Sable’s trying to do now with Akira. He doesn’t hold out _that_ much hope—he didn’t even _know_ that he looked at Keith that way while shooting their last clip before this—but at least Keith doesn’t call him on it. He starts quaffing up a deep breath as though there’s nothing in the world going even remotely wrong.

Shiro waits for Keith to stop, then yanks on the waistband. He isn’t putting in as much effort as he could, but he grunts about it anyway. He screws up his face and grumbles—then lets out a halfway-growling sigh. “I thought I told you to _suck in_, Akira!”

“I _am _sucking in,” Keith protests. “_You_ aren’t pulling hard enough!”

Whining like that, Keith lets go of the progress that they made. But one glare from Shiro makes him snap back to where they were, pulling his stomach back a little further this time. When the button still doesn’t let Shiro shove it anywhere, Keith’s belly surges out and he shakes his head. He gives Shiro a guilty, sulking, starry-eyed pout that kicks him in the chest with a desire to rip these jeans off of Keith, and drop the act, and hold him close while kissing him gently and telling him that everything’s alright. That he’s beautiful and perfect and everything is going to be fine.

That’s not in the cards for today’s clip-shoot, though. It’s probably _never_ going to be, either.

Instead of softening for Keith while he looks so vulnerable, Shiro keeps tugging on the waistband, dragging it into Keith’s plush, yielding waist without any plans for letting up. “I can only pull as hard as physics will _allow_,” he tells Keith, jostling his paunch with a wolfish grin. “You might be a particularly squishy, soft, and _flabby_ breed of lard-ass, Baby—but this big, fat belly that you’ve gained is still, technically, a solid mass. You need to cooperate with me about this or else you’re _never_ fitting in these jeans _again_.”

With a cold chuckle, Shiro drops one side of Keith’s fly so he can pat Keith right on his belly’s pudgy side. “You can always concede defeat, you know.” Picking up that fabric once again, Shiro tugs as hard as he can—not that it matters. He catches Keith on the inhale, while his belly’s at its roundest and there’s no hope of getting the button and hole within a stone’s throw of each other. “If you’ve endured enough of this to believe me, then there’s no shame in giving up and admitting I was right.”

Keith’s eyes glimmer like, _“Oh, fuck you gently with a chainsaw”_—and he doesn’t miss a beat. He sucks in the deepest breath that he has yet, pulls his belly even tauter than he did while he was trying to fasten the jeans himself.

As Shiro takes his time on tugging the waistband, the way Keith bites his lip seems nervous. As he watches Shiro pretending that he has his hands on as much struggle as he did before, there’s a tremble in Keith’s jaw—barely noticeable but distinctly there, even if it doesn’t show up on the playback later—and oh, God, Shiro shouldn’t jerk his chain right now… Even if _Keith’s _been happy to tease him like a little minx in the clips they’ve shot together thus far, it doesn’t mean that _Shiro_ needs to turn that back around on him… He _shouldn’t _make Keith wonder if the jeans might actually refuse to fasten, if he’s going to fail at popping a button off because he simply got too big to do the button up…

But Keith keens so pretty when Shiro teases a fingertip along one of the deep, red grooves he’s cutting into the soft flab around Keith’s tummy. Tutting gently, Shiro lets himself slouch and allows his face soften. He rests more of his weight on Keith’s hips than on his knees, but doesn’t tease at Keith’s crotch. Any brush against his erection happens accidentally, while Shiro’s scrunching up his face with a feigned amount of grit and sighing as he continually falls short of bringing the button and the hole together.

Who cares if he goes too doe-eyed at Keith, right now? Who cares if he looks too besotted for anyone to believe that he could dom anybody ever in his life? Who cares if they’re even kinda right that this is the worst he’s ever done for anybody and it’s spelled out all over his face in mixed shades of adoration and regret? Shiro’s trying to seem like he’s feeling sympathetic to “Akira’s” plight. Trying to seem like he’s tired and worn down, but nevertheless trying his best against odds more insurmountable than he ever reckoned.

With each tug that he pretends is futile, he’s trying to make Keith think that he _doesn’t _have the control that he’s had over every aspect of the scene so far—even when Shiro’s taken the lead, all Keith had to do was redirect his efforts or spit out a safe-word if he wanted things to stop—and despite the thorny, writhing, hot, sick guilt that’s prickling like it wants to puncture Shiro’s lungs, he’s trying to make Keith wonder if _maybe_ the situation’s gotten truly hopeless. Because Keith _wanted_ to go rougher than they have before—and right now, Shiro can’t imagine anything rougher than Keith’s jeans _actually_ not fitting him.

Heaving a bone-deep sigh that he has to all but drag out of his chest, Shiro gives Keith a sad shake of his head. “You can ease up now, Baby.” As if this emphasizes his point, he lets go of Keith’s fly. He pushes the fabric aside and rests his freed up hands on the warm, plump rolls of fat around Keith’s middle. “I mean, I’ll keep trying, if you really want me to, but—”

“But _what_? But _nothing_!” Keith yelps, then blushes (and probably remembers that the walls are not thick enough for the neighbors to let him get away with yelling). He hunches his shoulders, apparently not noticing how this makes his belly pooch out even further. Brow furrowed and eyes wide, he doesn’t pout at Shiro—but only because there’s too much desperation in his face for Shiro to call this expression _pouting_. “You _can’t _give up on me like that, Sable. Come on, you _said_ that you would _help_ me! How could you even _think_—”

“Because I can only do so much and your _belly’s _getting in the way, alright?” Shiro reaches over to brush Keith’s bangs back off his forehead. “I want to keep going, Baby—_honestly_, I do. But if the jeans don’t fit you anymore—”

“They’ll _fit_ if you keep _trying_ with me!” Keith’s eyes burn with need—and whether he notices or not, they’re watering. Not by much, not yet. Still, the tears glisten as they well up in his eyes, and it’s likely by sheer force of will that Keith doesn’t allow them to break the water-line, not yet. Gasping softly, he throws one of his hands forward and clutches hard at Shiro’s elbow. “Sable, _please_… **_Please_** don’t quit on me—”

“I would never _quit_ on you, Akira. I’m just saying that the laws of physics—”

“_Fuck_ the laws of physics!” Keith’s grip tightens like a vise and he doesn’t let up until Shiro whines in pain. “Are you _with me_, Sable: yes or no.”

Act or not, Shiro doesn’t even need to think. He nods and curls his fingers up in the denim one more time. “I’m with you for as long as you want me to be with you,” he promises, because Sable _would_ say that, at the moment, and it happens to be true of Shiro, too. “Suck in when you’re ready, Baby.”

Keith takes a deep breath without sucking in. Probably needs to steady himself. But he returns to pulling his stomach soon enough—and oh _God_, this time, he goes in so hard on himself that he lets slip a high-pitched whine… He doesn’t make himself look _thin_, but with him being up almost seventy-five pounds from where he started, that’s probably no longer in Keith’s wheelhouse. The strain is obvious in his tightly clenched eyes and the way he grinds his teeth.

Guilt worms around inside of Shiro’s chest again, burrowing through him en route to the home that it _always_ has around his heart. But Keith still hasn’t let any tears come out… Just _one more_ round of teasing him about this. One more, and Shiro will move on if Keith still doesn’t allow himself to cry. There’s only so much dragging this out that Shiro can justify, only so much controlled pain that he can cause.

Fortunately for his ruse, Keith’s waistline has ballooned so much that buttoning the jeans remains a tall order, even with Keith sucking his belly back so far that he almost makes himself look like he’s only put on a little bit of weight. Even with the extra layer of makeshift corsetry that gravity provides, bearing down on Keith’s gut and refusing to let it show its _full_, chubby, blubbery magnificence, Shiro has to pull on the waistband. There’s still room for him to groan about how hard this is, and grunt about whether or not Keith’s _really_ giving this his best efforts. The words sting almost as much as the more obvious insults that Shiro’s slung at Keith since this shoot started—and the uncertainty in Keith’s eyes hits like a sucker-punch.

When Keith gives him a wobbling, pleading look, Shiro gives the jeans the hardest tug he’s managed in this round. Keith’s eyes light up as Shiro seems to get the button in—but Shiro nudges the waistband as he pulls his hands away. It’s a quick motion. Subtle. Hopefully, if Shiro pulled this off correctly, the video playback later will make it look like he didn’t do anything to Keith’s jeans at all. If Shiro did this right, then it will look like he fastened the button and without popping off, it slipped loose on its own.

Given how Keith crumples up his face—considering the quivering, fretful note that fumbles out of his throat—he can’t see the ruse for what it is. More tears well up in his eyes at this, and when Shiro combs his hair off of his face again, Keith makes a strangled noise that likely wants to be a sob but he won’t let it.

“How are you not _getting_ this to work?” Gritting his teeth, Keith rubs the heels of his hands at his eyes. Tugging his fingers through his hair, he lets out a quiet wail—it’ll sound loud enough when Shiro edits the clip later, but he must be holding back so no one puts in a noise complaint about them—and thumps his head against his pillow. He must not get the relief he wanted, though, because Keith bangs his head another time. Then a third time. And then a fourth one, after that.

Okay, this… Definitely wasn’t what Shiro wanted Keith to do. Sure, the pillow’s soft enough—but just in case, Shiro shushes softly and checks to see if Keith feels any pain when Shiro brushes a hand down the back of his skull. He _doesn’t_, and he promises to let Shiro know if that ever changes, but his voice trembles with all the effort that he’s putting into making it sound like everything is fine. Into _faking_ like this upset isn’t as bad as it seems to be. Downplaying what he feels, the way that Keith does so often—

“Baby, _please_ look at me.” Shiro has no idea how he keeps his hand so still as he rests it on Keith’s cheek. He waits for Keith to look at him, but the tears that spill out onto Keith’s cheeks almost make Shiro wish he hadn’t bothered. “We’re having a difficult time of things right now—more so than I knew we’d have—but I’m _not_ giving up on you. I’m not giving up on _us_, or this, or _anything_—”

“But what if you were right about me when we started,” Keith keens and both the pain and the fear seem more than slightly genuine. His eyes mist over yet again, but he doesn’t flinch or try to look away—probably only because Shiro _asked him_ for this eye-contact. The deep breath that he draws in sounds like a shiver, even though Keith seems _remarkably_ still, for being so upset. “What if this doesn’t _work_, Sable? I haven’t weighed myself or taken measurements or _any_ of it lately, so I don’t know?” He shrugs and whimpers. “What if I_ have_ just gotten too big and fat and flabby for my _favorite jeans_?”

The lie in that little speech briefly knots up Shiro’s brow. He _knows_ that Keith is lying about not having seen the business end of a scale because he told Shiro otherwise when they got started—and it makes no _sense_ for Keith to be lying to him, but? Keith might be beyond the point of thinking, or too wrapped up in Akira to think of this as _lying_. So, Shiro sighs and he decides to let it go.

“Then we can stop, if that’s what you really want to do,” he swears, brushing his thumb over Keith’s flushed, warm skin. “If you decide that you don’t want to know, then I won’t push you on it. We’ll stop this now, and I’ll help clean you up and then make dinner, and we can do whatever makes you happy.” Fighting off another sigh before it starts—smothering the guilt that’s kicking at his ribs like it has every intent of breaking them—Shiro doesn’t let himself look away from Keith. “There’s no shame in _you_ wanting to drop this, and no matter what you want? I won’t judge you for it. Tell me what you want and I’ll see that I fulfill every bit of that desire to the best of my ability. But I’m not quitting until you decide it’s time.”

With a soft sigh, he trails the back of his hand down Keith’s face, past his softened jawline, over the gentle curve of his neck—until finally, he can squeeze Keith’s shoulder. “Do you still want to see if we can get you in these jeans?”

Keith shuts his eyes to think about it. As the tears roll down his cheeks, something inside of Shiro feels like it could snap in half. He can’t let this go. Can’t let Keith cry like that without doing _something_ to help make it right—especially when Shiro is _literally responsible_ for the tears. Not in a tangential and self-blaming way, but in a very real sense that nobody could deny the truth of. For once, Shiro is blaming himself for something that really is his fault.

Even if leaning down to Keith sets them back on getting the jeans done up, he doesn’t care. Shiro nestles himself up on Keith’s chest and stomach again. He snugs his abs along Keith’s pudge like a caress instead of with a mind to make Keith feel even bigger than he is already. As he’s getting comfortable, a hand slips onto the small of his back—but Keith hesitates, doesn’t rub faint circles around Shiro’s skin until Shiro nods for him that this contact is perfectly okay. It’s a hard shift from where they’ve been for the past several minutes, but if Shiro doesn’t think about it, then his head can’t spin or feel like it’s bogged down in things he doesn’t fully understand just yet—

Still, Keith doesn’t flinch away when Shiro kisses at the damp trails on his cheeks. He smiles almost beatifically. Almost _knowingly_. As if there’s something going on that Shiro doesn’t realize, some bigger scheme at work that he didn’t see coming. But before Shiro can ponder anything too long—before he can even _dream_ of piecing anything together—a hand shoves its way into the back-pocket of his jeans.

That makes him startle well enough—but then Keith cops a feel of his ass, and Shiro can’t help squeaking. His cheeks flush warm, from the sound he made as well as from the groping, and as he squirms, Keith looks up at him with a big, faux-innocent smile.

“Sorry, Babe,” he says with the distinct air of someone who doesn’t know what that word—_“sorry”_—even _means_. “Sorry, you were being serious, I _know_, but…” He shrugs like _hey, what can you do? _and bats his eyelashes like he’s daring Shiro to be mad at him when he’s being so adorable. “Your butt was _right there_, y’know? It was right there, and it’s all cute and firm and perky, and I _had_ to get my hands on it, okay? I couldn’t _help_ it—”

“Oh my _God_, you _brat_!” Shiro balks and play-swats at Keith’s bicep. Sadly, they’re pressed too close together for Keith to jiggle as much as could otherwise—but he gives Shiro a pouty little smile as if that should make up for pulling such a stunt after he was literally sobbing.

Strangely enough, it kinda does. Or at least it makes Shiro feel better about carding his fingers through Keith’s hair and asking, “So, should I take that as a sign you’re ready to get this jeans situation figured out? I mean, you might as well call in at work—but if we need to get you new pants today, we should probably figure that out—”

A swift, firm _thwack! _cuts Shiro off and makes him squeak again.

Another _thwack! _makes the pain come in more clearly, and Shiro’s cheeks flush hotter than a sauna as he realizes: oh, that’s a hand. Keith’s hand. And it’s slapping him square on the ass. And his muscle is bouncing in response to the impact, but not in the same way as Keith’s chub. Not that he can appreciate the differences that much when Keith’s curling a hand around his ass like he’s holding onto something more important than the task at hand.

Which Shiro should _mind_—or at least take a more significant issue with Keith doing—because he was _trying_ to make sure that he didn’t hurt Keith any, which is _serious_ and Shiro shouldn’t appreciate Keith being such a little snot instead of letting Shiro just take care of him.

But when Keith teases his fingertips along the curve of Shiro’s backside, he finds himself sighing in contentment and urging himself toward Keith’s hand. When Keith pouts at him like, _“Please, Babe? I really, really, really like your ass and smacking it is so much fun, please can I have another turn,” _it’s the perfect chance for Shiro to object to any of this—and instead, he gives Keith a nod.

That smack lands harder than its predecessors. Still not as hard as Keith _could_ do, if he wanted—but the pain makes Shiro groan. The impact makes him grind his hips on Keith’s, which in turn makes their cocks rub on each other. Between the contact, and the closeness, and the _oh-god-please-want_ knotting up in Shiro’s stomach, he moans so deeply and so much, he almost misses when Keith grabs his ass with both hands.

And that grope, Shiro mostly notices because Keith holds him in place while bucking up at him, dragging his hips up Shiro’s in a motion that’s so long, and slow, and agonizing, everything starts going white around the edges of Shiro’s vision—

Until Keith abruptly drops back to the mattress. Underneath of Shiro, he tenses up. Sucks in his stomach even though they aren’t working on getting his jeans done up just yet. He keens—but it’s a deeper sound than usual. More guttural. More _needy_. And it gives way to a round of mewling that kicks Shiro in the chest with guilt for how long Keith’s been holding off on letting himself cum—though he’d probably appreciate that more if Keith weren’t rutting at him like he has no idea how to stop and doesn’t want to.

Shiro doesn’t allow himself to sigh, or shake his head, or roll his eyes. He shoves down any of the objections teasing at the back of his mind, and bears down against Keith’s hips. Rocking on him hard, he stumbles into finding a rhythm with Keith. He bites his lip and hold back on the groans and sighs that bubble up each time their cocks manage to find each other. The only noise he lets himself slip up about is the throaty little whine when Keith squeezes him tight between those barely-contained, seam-straining, flabby, perfect thighs. That sound comes out of Shiro before he even realizes that he’s in danger of feeling it.

One hard thrust down at him, and Keith’s thighs clamp around Shiro’s hips and chest like Keith means to suffocate him with those thighs. Not actually a horrible idea, in another context—but right now? Keith’s hips jerk up and he throws his head back as much as he can. Everything about him is a white-hot line of heat and tension and need, rocking up on Shiro, yearning for release that he’s been working for but hasn’t gotten—

Shiro snakes a hand down along Keith’s pudgy side, pressing into Keith’s supple chub. Lifting himself off of Keith _just enough _to maneuver a bit, he grabs up a sizable roll of Keith’s belly-fat. Jostling it doesn’t do much good—they’re still pressed too close together, Keith’s flesh doesn’t have that much room to jiggle—but Shiro sends a few little ripples coursing through Keith’s stomach. As he rubs on Shiro, faster and more desperately, Keith nods by way of saying that the touch is good. That he trusts Shiro to help him with this last phase of getting off.

“God, you’ve turned into such a fat-ass, Baby,” Shiro purrs, squishing Keith’s chub between his palms, rolling it around between his fingers. He wants to watch that—he _loves_ the way Keith’s body moves, if not as much as he loves Keith himself—but as he kneads Keith’s belly, Shiro doesn’t look away from Keith’s face, from the eyes Keith is struggling to keep open. “However much you’ve gained, there’s no going back from this. You’ve awakened something—something hungry, and needy, and _gluttonous_. Insatiable, just like you’ve been since you lost your sense of self-control. And don’t lie to me about. There’s _nothing_ you can do to stop yourself…”

He ruts back at Keith, harder than he needs to be, silencing his own response so Keith’s keyed-up moaning will be the only thing the mics pick up. Pushing Keith back down to the mattress, Shiro slithers against him. He can go faster with his thrusts than Keith—after all, however nimble Keith still is in many ways, he’s adjusting to a pretty big and somewhat rapid weight gain—and each time that he jerks his hips, Keith’s keening gets hotter, and heavier, and more frantic.

“How could you not even _see_ what you were doing to yourself? How you’ve been turning into such a fat, round, greedy tub of lard?” Shiro bucks at Keith’s hips while squeezing on that gorgeous, pudgy tummy, like warm, soft putty in his hands.

While Keith moans for him wordlessly, he snorts. “We have _mirrors_, Baby. You could’ve taken _one look_ at yourself and seen what everybody else can see: you’ve gotten chubby. You are _getting_ fat. And you’re such a fucking _pig_ that you won’t even _try_ to stop yourself from adding more chub to your spare tire. And making your big boy love-handles even wider. And putting more padding on your _enormous_. **_flabby_**. thighs—as if they _needed_ to be any bigger…”

Keith’s breath hitches. He jerks and twitches underneath of Shiro. Face twisting up with too many things at once, Keith turns those beautiful eyes right on Shiro. They glimmer with need, only fluttering shut when Shiro bears down on his cock again, grinds on his erection and hopes for Keith’s sake that _this_ stroke is the one to get him off.

It isn’t, but Keith lets loose an indecipherable noise that says he might be right up at the edge. Like he needs one more push in the right direction. As if Keith can tell what Shiro’s thinking when even he has no idea what his mouth might decide to say for him, he locks his gaze on Shiro’s, and he nods, and as Shiro rolls on his hips again, Keith whimpers, “_Sable… Please_…”

Only one thing comes to mind that might give Keith the right nudge. God, but Shiro hopes it works. Taking a deep, slow breath feels so at-odds with the frenetic jerking of his hips—but once he’s steady, Shiro kisses Keith. First on the forehead, then the apple of his cheek, then the tip of his nose.

Keith grabs his ass two-handedly again. Bucks up on him, clinging to his backside like he might literally die if anyone makes him let go of Shiro, ever. Whines at Shiro with a need so potent, it makes Shiro’s insides writhe, burning with secondhand fire. Kissing him on the mouth doesn’t stifle that grousing, but at least Keith turns his head. Leans up into the kiss as if he means to devour Shiro through it—

Shiro jerks away before he can. He hovers close, but just outside Keith’s range. Grinding on him slow and hard and intent on _getting Keith off_ so he can have some release already, Shiro coos, “_God_, what _happened_ to you, Baby? How’d even you get so big, and plump, and heavy like this? I’m gonna have to _roll you_ places, if you keep going like this. Could you _really_ let yourself go so badly without _meaning_ it?”

Keith inhales sharply. Pulls his stomach so tight that it almost disappears. Tightens his legs around Shiro, like he’ll never let up, ever.

Chuckling drily, Shiro pushes Keith’s bangs off of his forehead. “You’ve turned into such fat-ass on me, Baby,” he says, right up against Keith’s mouth, but without giving him another kiss. “And to think: you used to be _so. thin_—”

He could keep going down that rabbit hole. Shiro _knows_ he could.

But Keith chokes out a cry that’s tighter than Shiro’s abs. He rocks against Shiro one more time, breath stuck in his throat, mouth trembling with so many things that _Keith_ probably can’t tell what all of them are. Then, curling tighter into Shiro—so tightly that it hurts, even with how plush and soft his thighs have gotten—digging his fingertips _hard_ into the curve of Shiro’s ass, Keith manages to gasp. A keening sound comes out of him—

Then, he drops to the mattress with a sigh. The box-spring creaks more than it should do, probably—but Keith’s breathing too heavily to care. He’s boneless underneath of Shiro, limp and relaxed, with a smile teasing at his lips.

After a few moments—once he’s remembered how to do that _breathing_ thing and doesn’t need to heave his chest with each inhale—Keith’s right back to fondling Shiro’s ass and smiling like a cat who got himself into the really, really good cream. It’s like he doesn’t even care that his jeans are still gaping, or that he’s spilled a warm, sticky mess of cum inside the front of his shorts. Hell, it’s almost like he has no idea what _refractory period_ means and could be good to go again _right now, this very second_.

“Such a _nice_. fucking. _butt_,” Keith sing-songs to no tune in particular. Shiro’s glad that Keith doesn’t notice his cheeks going pink—more so when Keith keeps babbling: “But you’ve _always_ had a nice butt, though. Like, total, jealousy-worthy levels of amazing, gorgeous ass…”

Groping Shiro’s ass is one thing, but now? Keith’s moved on to caressing it, brushing his hands over the muscle so gently, he might very well be terrified of somehow breaking Shiro. “I mean, like, before everything, too? Before you got back and all. God, your ass was _gorgeous_ back then, and it’s _still_ so good, okay? It’s _perfect_. But, like, a different kind of perfect, ’cause you had a perfect ass when you were still, like—”

“Okay, _okay_! I get it!” Aside from how much Shiro’s blushing, he has to cut Keith off before he totally breaks character. _And_ before he says anything that Shiro can’t handle hearing, at the moment. “I’m flattered that you like my butt so much, Baby. But you can do whatever you want with it _after_ we handle the other thing. Y’know, the thing about your jeans? The thing that _you_ wanted to do in the first place?”

Keith blinks his eyes open—likely so he can pout with maximum efficiency. “But I wanna touch your _butt_, though…”

_Jesus_, Keith is unexpectedly clingy and whiny after coming. It’s making Shiro’s heart try to outdo the Russian Olympic gymnastics team, from flip-flopping around so much. He can hear his pulse in his ears, and God help him? When Keith starts brushing his hands up his back, setting Shiro’s nerves on fire with just his touch, Shiro can’t stop himself from sighing. And when Keith scrunches up his face like he’s perfectly fine but still wants Shiro to think that he could maybe cry again, Shiro wishes they could drop character, give the job a miss, and say everything that they just did was _real._

More than that, Shiro doesn’t want to upset Keith any. Especially not when Keith’s so warm and soft and comfortable beneath him. Or when Keith’s holding Shiro like he’s actually important, as if this is a universe where Shiro _matters_. Or when Keith’s making the single cutest, pleading face that Shiro has ever seen in his entire sad, pathetic life.

Still, _work_ is one half of the phrase _“sex work”_—which means that all Keith’s cuddly, clingy afterglow will need to wait.

“Yeah, yeah, quit pawing the merchandise, you _brat_. Before I make you pay for it.” Rolling his eyes and shaking his head, Shiro has no idea what he means by that. But as he sits up on Keith’s lap again—as he readjusts Keith’s waistband—he decides that he really doesn’t care right now. “You ready to get this done for real?”

He only waits for Keith to nod because he can’t get the jeans buttoned without Keith’s help.

Keith doesn’t even whine while sucking in his belly this time, though he does scrunch up his face in completely understandable discomfort. Once he’s ready, though, Shiro makes quick work of finagling the button where it ought to be.

“Told you I could do it,” Keith points out, smirking.

“Hey, you’re not done until the zipper’s up, too.” Shiro arches an eyebrow at Keith’s crotch. There’s a large, visible damp spot on his underwear, but with the way his chub protrudes from between the zipper’s teeth… “I’m gonna need you to suck in again, okay? We’re almost done, but I don’t think—”

Keith cuts him off by inhaling far too loudly and sucking in for Shiro one more time.

This process is more delicate and it takes more patience. Even without Keith’s rolls of belly-fat poking out in inconvenient places, the zipper has more work to do. More of a load to bear than the button does. There isn’t enough fabric in these jeans to completely contain Keith’s stomach—which was to be expected, really, considering that Keith’s gotta be at least two sizes too big for them by now. And, really, the tightness of the jeans is part of why this exercise is so appealing. The way that the denim cleaves to Keith’s skin, the way that it strains around his paunch and makes his bulges of flab look even bigger, the way that the fabric seems to creak when he moves…

It’s intoxicating, for all Shiro’s never come up with a decent explanation as to _why_. All he knows for sure is that his breath sticks in his throat, every time the zipper hits a spot that’s a bit too thick…

And that he feels a bit lightheaded—a bit like he’s going to pass out, and then his head will spin clean off his shoulders, and then he’s going to _die_—every time the zipper snags and plays like it’s going to give up, forcing Shiro to undo it and try pressing on Keith’s chub to nudge it into a less inconvenient place…

And he feels a chill plummeting down his spine and something prickling at the back of his throat—a threat that he could start hacking red azaleas up and ruin everything—every time Keith slips up on tightening his abs, letting some of his soft, pale flab swell back into place with a vengeance, pressing on the zipper and trying to undo the progress that they’ve made…

Finally, Shiro clicks the zipper to its ending point. Sighing in relief, he topples backward—and with a snort, Keith spreads his legs so that Shiro lands on the mattress instead of on Keith’s lap. Which is fine. Keith’s probably sick of being low-key suffocated by a two-hundred-fifteen-pound dead-weight made of long hair, firm abs, and a crush on Keith that, knowing Shiro’s luck, will never be resolved.

“You ready to eat crow yet, Sable?”

Shiro huffs, tucking his legs up crosswise. “If _you’re _ready to sit up and _prove_ that you can keep them fastened. Unless you don’t think that you _can_—which I wouldn’t _blame_ you for thinking, because in all likelihood? You can’t.”

Without making a move to sit up, Keith waves dismissively at Shiro. “I’ll sit up in a minute, you bossy fuck.”

Flipping his fringe off his face and forcing himself to sit up straight, Shiro watches how Keith’s breathing. The fact that he even _can_ still breathe in these jeans is probably a miracle. His belly rises with each inhale, making the button quiver. Shiro holds his own breath, waiting for the button to pop off—but it clings on stubbornly, even harder than Keith was clinging to Shiro’s ass, a few moments ago. As nerve-wracking as it is to wait for that busting-off to happen, Shiro could just sit here all night, watching Keith loaf around contentedly, all fat and happy, even if there’s no way that those jeans are comfortable for him.

Except that’s not a real option, no matter how much Shiro wishes that it were. Aside from the fact that Hunk will need to come home eventually, and aside from the fact that, sooner or later, Keith will get bored and need to _do something_ with himself, Shiro’s cock is throbbing, aching, screaming at him about the fact that _he_ hasn’t gotten off yet, either. He’s gonna need a cold shower to take care of that, and he can’t get one until Keith has burst forth from the too-small chrysalis created by his jeans.

Part of Shiro twists in preemptive guilt at the idea that crops up in the back of his mind, using more verbal humiliation to bait Keith into sitting up already. Something about that entire notion feels _wrong_. Even if Keith literally just came over Shiro ripping into him about his weight, they might be past the point of that kind of dirty talk being acceptable to his ears. But on the other hand, Keith _wanted_ to hear Shiro talk like that, in the first place… And maybe it could appeal to his competitive streak—

“I’m gonna count lying there as a form of concession, if you don’t even _try_ to sit up.” Shiro allows himself to slouch slightly, frowning at Keith’s tummy and at him refusing to just play along and make this easier. “I can help you up, if you don’t think that you can get there on your own—”

“I can get there _fine_, Sable. I just need a minute—”

“You’ve had _several_ minutes, Baby.” Since grabbing Keith’s belly might keep him from sitting up, Shiro traces his fingers up the inside of Keith’s thigh instead. The seams are barely hanging on, and as Shiro presses into a particularly pudgy roll, right below Keith’s crotch, he can’t help wondering if anything will burst when Keith sits up. “You know what I think?”

“Something _stupid_, probably.” Keith scoffs. Squirms. Makes his muffin-top and love handles crunch down even harder on his waistband—and yet, the button doesn’t budge. “Probably something about how much you want to stuff me full of cupcakes. Sit me down, make me eat a whole baker’s dozen of those little bastards, just because they’re delicious and it’s _fun_.”

“That sounds like an awful lot of wishful thinking, Tubby.” Something wells up in Shiro’s throat when he spits out that insulting nickname. Something hot and thick and stuck behind his Adam’s apple—Jesus, _this_ again… He _knows_ that he knows where he got these words, it’s right at the tip of his tongue, but he can’t lose sight of what _Sable_ is supposed to do—

“Not that I _doubt_ your ability to gorge yourself on thirteen cupcakes and then ask to have some more. I have no doubt that you’d pull that off, no trouble for you whatsoever.” Huffing, Shiro bats at Keith’s thigh. God, he wishes Keith were naked so his flabby, perfect legs could jiggle freely—but for now, it’s more than good enough to watch Keith’s pudge yield to the impact, then flop back into place when Shiro’s hand retreats. “Right this second, Akira? I’m wondering if I shouldn’t cut you off from having any cupcakes until you drop a little bit of weight. For your own good, obviously—”

“There is _nothing_ good about a life lived without cupcakes, you skinny bitch.” Keith lifts his head so he can glare at Shiro almost properly—then he whines and pouts when Shiro jostles his chunky thigh. “Besides, you can’t take your eyes off me when I’m putting them away. So, don’t act like you aren’t enjoying this—”

“Oh, _I’m _enjoying this?” Shiro laughs. He has no idea where it’s coming from—but it bursts out of him as he sinks his fingers back into Keith’s chunky thighs. “Maybe I go crazy when you’re happy, Baby, but right now? All I wanted to do was make you admit that your jeans don’t fit because you’re blubbering out like no one’s business. I only wanted you to stop living in denial. Face the music, own up to reality, and admit to both of us how much you’re getting _fat_.”

He could let up on playing with the chub along Keith’s legs. He probably _should_ let up on that, at least a little. But Keith’s whining is so cute, and hey, playing with his flab is fun. Watching him squirm around and grin like a contented kitten over _something_ about this situation, it’s making Shiro’s cock throb like it has no intent of letting him hold off until he makes it to the shower. The way Keith rocks toward him and delightedly scrunches his face when Shiro massages his flesh—everything Keith does makes Shiro feel like his heart is beating too hard and too fast for him to get any of the benefits. Like he’s catching breaths but might as well be drowning on dry land.

Moreover, since Keith isn’t sitting up yet—since he isn’t getting to the money-shot and popping the button off his waistband—Shiro has to do _something_ to keep things entertaining. For Keith, himself, and for the future audience. Which is easy enough. Splaying both hands out on the insides of Keith’s thighs, Shiro jostles all of that thick, plump, wobbling flab as much as these skin-tight jeans allow. Maybe the fabric keeps him from jiggling too much, but his legs have so much _give_ to them that Shiro has to fight himself so he won’t gasp. Keith’s chub _yields so nicely _when Shiro rolls his hands around in it, squishes so well as he kneads at Keith and tries to lose his fingers in the softness of Keith’s legs.

“I don’t know where you get off telling me that I’m enjoying this, Akira,” he says, voice low and lips curling up into a smile. “_You’re_ the one who keeps leading me on, and refusing to sit up, and putting me in the position to run my mouth about how plump and chunky you’ve been getting, lately—”

“So now it’s _my_ fault that you’re getting off on calling me a fat-ass—”

“I didn’t _say_ that it’s your fault, Akira. I only said that maybe you _like_ hearing me lay into you like this.” Drumming his fingers along Keith’s inner thighs, Shiro smirks. Keith’s not looking at him to appreciate it, but maybe he’ll do that when he sees the edited clip later. “I mean, what kind of person puts on eighty-some-odd pounds or however many much you’ve gained by now, then actually _wants_ to hear somebody going on about how big he is?”

Shiro hums faux-pensively, and bats at Keith’s chub. When Keith makes a noncommittal sound, Shiro huffs and gives him a firmer, swifter _thwack!_—and he allows himself a chuckle when Keith whines for him. “What sort of guy lets himself chunk up, the way that you have—balloons up big and plump, and has to _know_ he’s turning into a total porker, but keeps on going anyway? I mean, you must’ve suspected _something_, since none of your clothes even remotely fit you anymore and you stuff yourself silly on a freaking daily basis—”

Keith lets out a hot, staccato laugh—but it turns into a whine when Shiro slaps his thigh again.

“Are you honestly denying how much you like this?” Shiro doesn’t mean to sound so cold. But God, something lusty flares up in his lungs at the way Keith’s wriggling underneath him. If he can make Keith do that even more—“Because that’s what I’m asking you, Akira. I wanna know what sort of guy pigs out so much it strains credulity, crams eighty pounds of squishy, fleshy, jiggling blubber onto an enviably slender body, gets so big that he wrecks up all his clothing—and then _wants_ to get ripped on for the weight problem that he’s created for himself?”

Tightening his grip on the fullest part of Keith’s chubby thighs, digging in his fingertips slightly below Keith’s crotch, Shiro shakes him. It’s only supposed to get Keith’s legs—but Shiro goes in hard enough to make Keith’s belly wobble, too. The impact shocks up Keith’s body and makes him. As Shiro watches that chubby mass shift up and down, his mouth starts going dry, his head spins and his brain teeters around like he could pass out, right here on Keith’s lap. Keith letting slip a longing sigh is the only thing that keeps Shiro in the moment.

“That’s exactly what you’ve _done_ here.” He swallows thickly and narrows his eyes as if it’ll keep him from being _Shiro_ instead of Sable. He jerks Keith harder before his chub can think of calming down. “You’ve given yourself a weight problem. Because you were one of the skinniest people that I’d ever met, until you decided to let yourself go and turned into a _human blimp_.”

The easy bouncing of Keith’s belly could keep Shiro transfixed so easily. Those slow, dragging movements, as if Keith’s stomach has too much bulk and can’t move quickly, not even when he has Shiro jerking him around. “Then, now that you’ve gone from slim and trim star forward to completely puffy fat-boy, not only do you _want_ to hear about how huge, and round, and fat you’re getting? About how you’ve put on enough weight that anybody else would’ve long since gotten on a freaking _diet_, encased yourself in all these extra, excess, calorie-laden pounds…”

Digging his hands harder into Keith’s chub, Shiro curls his lips up so tightly, he can feel them start to rip. “Not only do you _love _hearing me lay into you about your expanding waistline and your blown-up belly, your immense hips and the blubber on your thighs, your increasingly enormous, sagging ass… Not only do you get keyed-up like none other when I go on about your chunky double-chin, the plump, thick, chunky love-handles that strain the limits of your loosest shirts, your rolls of fat that bulge out absolutely everywhere, the dangling bat wings on your arms that none of your sleeves can keep hidden for you anymore…”

Shiro snakes around the mattress, pawing at Keith’s inner thighs. “But now, you can’t even _cum_ until somebody rubs your chubby, chipmunk cheeks in how you’re becoming a total _butterball_, just like I said? You’re a hippopotamic land-mass in the making, Baby. Soon enough, you’ll waddle everywhere instead of walking and every step will make you jiggle. You’ll knock things over, no matter what you do.”

He allows himself a contented sigh, and when his cock aches, he tries to focus on the way Keith’s blubber yields for him. “Then, that won’t be enough of a clue that you should learn to stop yourself, and you’ll keep right on gaining weight. You’ll get so huge that you can’t see the scale on your own and I’ll need to roll you places, if you ever want to take a trip outside. You could literally pull small moons out of orbit and that wouldn’t stop you from stuffing your face, either. You self-indulgent, fleshy wide-load—God, how could you even_ allow _yourself to get this big? How could you miss these massive jelly-rolls while they’ve been growing on your waistline? How could you not lift a finger to stop yourself getting so enormous—oh, wait, right.”

Huffing in amusement, Shiro bares his teeth. “Because you only lift _any_ fingers to shove more snacks into your greedy, gaping mouth.”

Shiro presses so far into Keith’s chub, he finds the muscle. He’s trying to control himself—but he can’t help grinning when Keith moans for him. “You’re a bloated, sloppy pig, Akira. That’s what you’ve made of yourself by pigging out like it’s going out of style. A flabby, jiggling, fat-ass _shadow_ of your once-athletic, skinny self—and you can’t get off until somebody tells you all about it. How the Hell does _that_ work?”

Keith snorts. “Is ripping your thesaurus a new one gonna make you feel better, Sable? Take the sting out of how, after all that foreplay, I completely proved you wrong?”

“It might do—if you ever _actually_ prove me wrong about anything I’ve said tonight. About—”

“Maybe you’re right about how I like it when you sweet-talk me—”

“_Sweet-talk _you? Try again, Baby.” Shiro balks. His hands clamp down around Keith’s chub so hard that he might leave bruises. Some part of Shiro hopes he does. “I’m trying to tell you that you’ve gotten **_fat_** since you quit working out and watching what you eat, Akira.” He sneers. He gives Keith’s thighs another jiggle. “I’m confronting you with how much of a gigantic, whopping _whale_ you’ve turned into—and you don’t even have the decency to be _ashamed_ of that.”

Vaguely, the sense that Shiro ought to know where he’s heard these words before charges back to Shiro’s mind, flaring up inside his skull.

As he watches Keith blushing and squirming and mewling like he wishes he could get hard again—as his heartbeat flutters faster than a hummingbird, flapping like it could stop or break out of his chest at any moment—the answer comes at Shiro with a diamond’s clarity and the sudden force of a bullet to the head.

He is spewing the things he’s told himself for years.

He’s taking all his old self-aimed insults and he’s throwing them at Keith. As if anybody else but Shiro could ever deserve to hear such—

Before Shiro can finish that thought, Keith thrusts a hand up at his face.

He blinks at it, momentarily dumbfounded, then shakes himself around. He’s on autopilot as he backs away from Keith, dragging him to sitting by the wrist. Even with Shiro hauling him around, Keith groans, and grunts, and whines as if he’s heaving himself up off the mattress on his own—and Jesus, Shiro nearly swoons from the way Keith looks right now. He’s all flushed and soft and breathing heavily, with his hair messed up and his skin suffering from a serious lack of kisses. Maybe later, if Keith ever wants to give him that. But for now, Shiro kneels at the foot of the bed so the cameras can get their best views of Keith’s body. Can’t let them miss the shot. Not after all this build-up.

Slouching like he’s getting tugging him down by the bulk around his midsection, Keith pushes his rolls of belly-chub closer together and makes them look even plumper than they are. His stomach pooches out onto his thighs and his muffin-top crushes the creaking waistband. His pale pudge very nearly covers up the button, which is barely hanging on. With each breath, Keith’s gut seems to press out further and jiggles when he exhales. He makes the button quiver—but nothing budges. What if “Akira” was right about he hasn’t put on that much weight, and what if after all the work that they’ve put in today—after everything that Shiro said and how he could’ve gone past humiliation, into _hurting Keith_—what if this climactic shot doesn’t end up—

_Riiiip! Pop!_

Something hits Shiro in the face. He flinches as it whangs him square between the eyes.

With a quiet little whine, he wrinkles his nose at Keith’s comforter. At the little circle of copper that’s sitting right there, glimmering under the lights. Blinking at it, Shiro swallows thickly… Keith not only burst the button off his jeans, but he hit Shiro in the face with it. That seems _unreal_, even though it literally just happened. As he hears another, louder ripping sound, Shiro tries to keep his breathing slow and even. As he turns his eyes up to Keith, he tries to keep a handle on himself, tries to keep from doing anything too untoward—

He can’t help gasping as Keith’s gut spills out of its confines, surging even further out into his lap. On one side of his fly, there are only fraying threads where something’s been ripped off. On the other side, the zipper remains zipped. The fabric crumples over, too flimsy to withstand the force and the sheer size of Keith’s distended middle. Watching the way Keith’s belly pulls back and flops out as he keeps breathing, Shiro chokes down a sigh. Refuses to let himself whimper, no matter how beautiful Keith is and how much Shiro wants to get his hands on Keith again, touching him all over his perfect, chubby body—

He soundly fails when Keith flexes his legs. One more **_rrrrrriiiiiiip! _**shocks through the air, and then another sends a sick, hard, yearning chill twisting straight down Shiro’s spine. As Keith’s thighs pop apart his inseams—as the jiggling pudge along his legs flows out into the open, freed up from the too-constricting denim—it seems to happen in slow-motion. Shiro trembles, unable to hold back on the tight, high-pitched, keening noise that comes creaking out of him, just from the sight of Keith’s chub sloshing out onto the mattress. His lungs spasm like they might make him start coughing, and his heart thrashes and writhes and threatens to plummet out of him. But still, he can’t take his eyes off of Keith.

That round, plump, pale belly scoots closer to him while Shiro’s blinking at it. Keith jiggles all up and down his torso, and he leans in close so that plush, wobbling flab is practically smacking into Shiro’s face, bearing down on him until he feels like he can’t breathe… That’s another good idea that they can try out later, if Keith wants. For the moment, though, Keith brushes his bangs off of his forehead and Shiro swallows thickly. He hopes that none of the cameras can pick up on how he gulps, that the sound of it doesn’t register on the mic, that Keith can’t hear or see him tensing up, can’t see him quivering with how much restraint Shiro needs to keep himself from reaching out and sinking his hands into that warm, soft, squishy paunch—

As if he can’t tell that anything’s amiss, Keith leans down and kisses Shiro’s forehead. “Alright, Skinny, you might be right about my fat ass not fitting in these jeans.” He cups his hand around Shiro’s cheek, holds his gaze and refuses to let him look away. “But come on: you _know_ that you’re into this. Into watching me stuff my face with an entire box of cupcakes, and watching me try to squeeze myself, and watching me plump up with every extra pound I gain, watching this chubby belly get even bigger for you…”

Smirking like a demon, Keith twitches his hips. Jostles his own flabby middle, right up here, mere centimeters from Shiro’s face. Snickers when Shiro gasps again, and whines, and shivers. “Uh huh, exactly like that, Pretty Boy. Just _try_ to tell me that watching me rip these pants to shreds didn’t get you all good, worked up and hot.”

Shiro’s higher brain shouts at him to deny everything. Screams at him to make a quick escape, to get himself off in the shower, and to hide until Keith’s found something else to be distracted by. Until he’s gotten wrapped up in dinner, or a book, or whatever he wants to do tonight.

Instead of giving him that break—instead of letting him do the _smart _thing—the regressive, yearning lizard brain makes Shiro shake his head.

“Not just that, Baby,” he says, his voice quivering like a rubber band, about to snap apart. “I’m just… Everything about you… Akira, you…” Fixated on Keith’s face, Shiro feels his face burning and his eyes sting as if they might mist over. “You’re the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I remember watching _End of Evangelion_ multiple times around when I was writing this chapter, and that probably says a LOT about the content here.
> 
> Long story short: Shiro took himself to some Not Great emotional places in the previous chapter, and now, he’s taking himself to even worse places while jerking off in the shower, being a self-loathing idiot about his kinks and how he can even have them after being bullied so viciously over his weight before, and dragging himself into an emotional flashback about being a fat, miserable teenager (feat. some more glimpses of childhood friends!Sheith).

Jerking off in the shower is supposed to be fairly simple and straightforward. Nothing should be able to wreck that so well that masturbation becomes _complicated_, not even feeling that chill in his chest like his lungs mean to get red azaleas all over everything. Not even fighting himself to keep from coughing, which Shiro _cannot_ let Keith hear him doing because if Keith hears Shiro coughing, then Keith might catch Shiro in the act of hacking up a red azalea.

And he _cannot_ let Keith see those telltale blossoms. Because if Keith sees them, then Keith will figure out everything that’s going on, and he’ll learn that Shiro’s been in love with him for long enough that he can’t remember when it started, and he’ll know _why _Shiro’s been taking these cold showers, and probably, he’ll guess what Shiro _does_ with them, the way he can’t even wash his hair until he’s had his hand around his cock and rubbed one out to thoughts of Keith—

Which will ruin everything, if Shiro lets it come to pass, because of course it will.

There’s even less comfort than usual to be found in this evening’s cold shower. So what, the bullets of freezing water smack hard on Shiro’s skin; it doesn’t do him any good. He’s still so hot, he can’t believe the water isn’t turning into steam. Slouching against the tile wall, he twists hard around his shaft. He tries to think about Keith’s smile, or his eyes, or the way he pouted when Hunk and Shiro out-voted him about getting a shower curtain with a pattern of the Starfleet insignia. He tries to force his mind onto his upcoming birthday, onto wondering how many slices of cake Keith will put away for it. Any thoughts will do, so long as Shiro avoids the deep, heavy lump of _something _that the clip-shoot knotted up inside his chest.

No dice, though. With each pump or twist he gives his cock, Shiro can’t shake off the guilt. Not like any of it’s _new_, exactly. It’s been about fourteen years since he first got off on thinking about other guys not fitting in their clothes. It’s been a little under nine since Lotor gave up on flirting, put his tongue in Shiro’s mouth, and not too long thereafter admitted that he had the same kind of kinky fantasies that Shiro did. He doesn’t remember when he first wondered about how Keith would look, sprawled out on his back and fighting with a pair of jeans that wouldn’t close—but that dream has dogged him for a while and, lately, reality has only made things worse.

God help him, though, Shiro can remember back to Christmas of sixth grade, to the first time that he got too chubby for his favorite jeans. Having lived through that would make his desires horrible enough. The fact that Shiro can remember everything with such sharp, painful clarity and _still_ gets turned on when he sees Keith’s buttons straining? It must make him a monster.

That summer had been awful, with Ojiisan’s diagnosis and the treatment that followed after. Obaasan has still been around, but she wasn’t well herself, so Aunt Satomi and her wife came out from California. They came to help and overall, they did. At least, they helped with the things that were most important—a category that did not include Shiro’s issues, so he didn’t share them.

But Shiro was just shy of two-hundred pounds by the time his aunts got to the old home back in Connecticut. No matter what his family or Keith or Laura (one of the only friends worth keeping from back home) or Adam (still a friend and secret crush, not yet Shiro’s first boyfriend) told him about how he looked, Shiro meant to spend the summer slimming down.

No matter how many times Ojiisan told him that he didn’t need to have a flat stomach to be happy, Shiro had a plan and every intention of sticking to it until every ounce of chub was gone. No matter what anybody said, he _needed_ to lose weight, needed to rid himself of whatever excess pounds he could before the problem got too far out of hand.

Sure, being on the heavy side wasn’t a death sentence. Of course, Shiro could’ve found his bliss at any size. He could’ve followed his brother’s example instead of dieting, because Ryou easily shrugged off getting heckled by their classmates if he so much as looked at food or whenever they were bored. But those insults ate away at Shiro. He wanted to fit in, for once, rather than being one of his class’s favorite verbal whipping boys. He wanted to go to school without being reminded of his size and how it made him an acceptable target for harassment. He wanted to go one day without getting picked on because he was a chubby kid, so his peers couldn’t let him exist in any kind of peace. He wanted all the bullying to stop.

More than that, Shiro just wanted to be _thin_. Wanted to get rid of everything he hated about his body. If he did, then everything would pretty much be perfect. That’s how it all seemed back then, just like how Shiro believed that losing weight in California would set right everything about his life. So help him, he was committed to getting there. He _wanted_ that promised happiness.

Except skipping meals only made him binge in secret, with Keith and Ryou sometimes covering for him (and always trying to tell him how stupid skipping meals was). If his problem wasn’t that, then it was Naoko and Obaasan insisting that he hadn’t had enough to eat at dinner. His plan to go out jogging daily got ruined as soon as Melissa, Adam’s twin sister, found out. Shiro’s family lives between Kolivan, Keith, and Antok’s house and the home of Melissa’s best friend, Kara, who was always on alert. Always watching out her bedroom window because she had a perfect view of the side-door by the Shiroganes’ kitchen.

He didn’t find out what happened until later, but whenever he left the house, Kara let their whole clique know and Melissa saw to it that _someone_ was out on Shiro’s route through their town. They shouted at him, catcalling about how his belly bounced and his thighs chafed at each other, crowing about how it didn’t look like the diet was doing any good, yet. Melissa’s clique kept it up until Shiro decided to stay in with Keith, reading or watching old movies and letting Keith kick his ass at _Mario Kart_.

Packing on over twenty pounds that summer was bad enough, but come September, Shiro had still been able to squeeze into his favorite jeans. At Ryou, Keith, and Adam’s urging, he wore them for the first day of school. It’d taken a good five minutes to get them on. Shiro had needed to lie down on his bed, exactly like Keith did in their shoot tonight—he’d needed to suck in his stomach for dear life and whine while he yanked on the fly and prayed that he’d get the button in its hole—but Shiro somehow made it work. The jeans were practically painted onto him, leaving nothing of his thicker midsection, fuller thighs, and bigger, fatter ass to the imagination.

After that first day, though, Shiro took push-pins and hung the jeans up on his bedroom wall. He swore to himself that he was committed and he’d get the weight loss right, this time. He’d stick to his diet and his meal plan, remember all the foods that were safe for him to eat, limit how many calories he gave himself each day, and never miss a daily workout. He wouldn’t let his classmates drag him down. He wouldn’t let his loved ones talk him out of anything. He’d do what needed to be done until he got himself under a hundred-fifty pounds and finally weighed less than Adam did—which, Shiro told himself, would meant that he was good enough to be Adam’s boyfriend.

(Shiro groans at that thought and shoves his shoulder-blades hard into the back corner of the shower. At the memory of how fastidiously he kept track of everything on Adam’s body and how accurate his guesses about Adam’s weight could be—as if he needs another hot, sick rush of guilt to stab him in the heart today. Great thought-fodder for jerking off: remembering that Adam was one of Shiro’s only friends, outside of Keith and Ryou, and he was the first guy who ever _wanted_ Shiro in return… and Shiro didn’t stop envying Adam’s tiny waistline and slim physique so much as he found different guys to focus on.)

Even without his crush on Adam, though, Shiro had ample reason to hate his belly and want it gone. More than he ever had before, he knew: his excess weight was the reason that he was miserable and he’d never be happy until he lost his love-handles, and his flabby thighs, and his gut that was already too big to be allowed.

His annual physical had been a wake-up call. Standing at five-foot-seven and weighing in at two-fifteen, Shiro had grown three-and-a-half inches but he’d gained a good sixty pounds as well. Seeing _218_ on the bathroom scale’s readout before leaving for that first day of school—that should’ve reaffirmed Shiro’s commitment to losing weight. He should’ve taken that number more seriously. Should’ve seen it as a bright, flashing neon sign of how much he needed to be resolute about staying on his diet.

Of course, that backfired. Every bit of it went up in smoke. Sure, Shiro shot up to five-foot-nine by Christmas Eve, but he also put on more than thirty extra pounds. Nearly thirty-five, which made Shiro’s head spin.

He didn’t want to believe it. Despite having no shirts left that would cover his entire stomach, the way his chub squashed down the waistbands of his jeans, and the deep, red, angry-looking marks that his pants left from where they cut into his flesh, Shiro didn’t want to accept that he’d only gotten fatter. He didn’t want to think that he’d slipped up worse than skidding on a patch of black ice and landing in a pratfall, and he’d let himself off the hook too easily and indulged himself too much during this alleged diet, and courtesy of his own negligence and failure, he’d gained enough weight to see the heart-stopping number, _251.5_.

Something must have been wrong with the scale, Shiro told himself. Maybe it was lying to him. Even though it was well past noon, he hadn’t eaten _anything_ yet, that day—but he’d spent the day before binging on sweets, nearly stuffed himself to bursting during lunch, and was only allowed to skip dinner because he faked a stomachache. That over-indulgence _must_ have been throwing off the scale’s ability to give Shiro any accurate reading of his weight.

So, he took his jeans off the wall, determined to put them on and prove that he could still slim down because still had a handle on his weight problem. Every fiber of his being burned with the need to prove that he’d only put on ten pounds since September. Maybe fifteen pounds, at the most, but definitely not thirty-three-and-a-half, the way the scale had tried to taunt him with.

First, the jeans snagged like they wouldn’t even let him get them up his thighs. After five minutes of stretching them out and easing them on slowly, like Satomi did with her stockings, Shiro managed to wriggle into the jeans. The seams strained around his legs like they were ready to pop if he moved too quickly or in the wrong way—but still, he got them on.

However, that wasn’t exactly a victory, not when his stomach crushed the waistband more than it did with most of his largest jeans, the ones that he’d been wearing lately. Pooching out around his middle, his belly looked bigger and rounder than it did usually. A chubby, pale brown mass of flesh and stretch-marks, mocking Shiro with how it pushed the sides of his fly so far apart, it seemed like he’d need a miracle to make them meet again.

Studying his reflection—taking in the details of his wider hips, the angry red stretch marks that had sprung up along his middle, his softer chest and arms, and all the extra jiggle in his thighs—Shiro resolved himself. He hadn’t gotten as big as he feared getting. He hadn’t yet crossed one of the lines that he called a Point Of No Return. All he had to do was prove this to himself. Come Hell or high water, he _would_ fit himself into those jeans.

Lying down, he tried doing up the button underneath his belly, the way that Ryou sometimes did with his jeans. But Ryou’s build took after Mom’s side of the family. As they’d later learn from Sven, Ryou had the same apple shape as most of the Tenō cousins who Shiro and Ryou had never had a chance to meet. Shiro’s build, contrariwise, took more after his Dad’s. Even early into puberty, he had the start of the broad, Shirogane shoulders. If Shiro hadn’t been so chunky, people could’ve seen what they do now that he’s at a weight he finds acceptable: his waist is both high on his torso and naturally pretty narrow, relative to his hips and shoulders.

(As he pumps harder and faster on his cock, Shiro tilts his head back. He strains his neck and rubs his skull and sopping hair along the tile. Despite the cold shower, every inch of him could be on fire, awash with longing, overflowing with heat that won’t let up for a single second. Strangling his own high-pitched, moaning sound and biting on his lip, Shiro rocks his hips up, thrusts into his own hand, and tries—keeps trying like his life depends on it—to turn his thoughts to Keith and not himself. To the way Keith’s face lit up for Shiro’s mac and cheese. To the way Keith idly plays with his chubby belly when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. Hell, if Shiro’s mind would let him focus on the way Keith whined that _he _**_was_**_ sucking in his tummy, though, Sable, now help him with the button, pretty please?_

—God, that would be infinitely preferable to what Shiro has right now: a cock that’s burning up and aching from how long he’s denied himself release. Memories he doesn’t want, which have no respect for Shiro’s needs and won’t leave him alone. Lungs filled up with red azaleas that he can’t cough up unless he wants to lose the best friend that he’s ever had. And a feeling like he’s got an anvil in his chest and an invisible hand curled tight around his windpipe.)

So, doing his jeans up underneath his belly hadn’t been a real option, but he tried it anyway. When it failed to work, Shiro wriggled around like Keith did earlier, tugging the waistband up as far as he could get it, trying to find the slimmest part of his torso that he could reach. He yanked on his fly with everything that he could muster and sucked his stomach in so hard that it hurt.

He didn’t pay attention to how long it took. He stopped counting how many times he tried but couldn’t get the button in its hole. All that mattered, in the end, was that Shiro _did_ get his jeans done up. He got the button through the hole and, with a bit of grunting and finagling and yet more sucking in, he zipped up close enough for him to count it as a win.

Maybe it wasn’t comfortable. Maybe it was difficult to breathe. Maybe Shiro’s chub squashed down on the waistband and spilled over the confines of the jeans—but at least Shiro had gotten them on and fastened.

With that victory secured, Shiro only needed to sit up. Instead, he stayed there on his bed, worming around and trying to get a feel for how those pants were fitting. From how tight they were, he guessed that he’d gained closer to his fifteen-pound estimate, give or take, possibly even a little more than that. But Shiro had gotten the jeans done up, which meant that the situation _could not_ be as bad as the scale had tried to tell him. He _needed_ to let himself enjoy it. Shiro had undeniably put on weight, which meant that he would need to double down on his dieting and forego any sweets until he finally worked off his plumped up, fat and flabby, repulsive, _stupid_ belly. He had to celebrate what little he could get.

Not that the celebration was worth too much. Not that it could last too long. Not that reality would cater to Shiro’s wishes when he hadn’t put in nearly half as much work as he thought he had. Even before he got the final piece of evidence, something inside of Shiro knew he wasn’t getting out of this with his hopes intact.

Counting on hope, in retrospect, was stupid. Sure, Shiro managed to wiggle into a t-shirt without sitting up and forcing himself to face the music. But that wasn’t real proof and he should have known better than to trust it. He should’ve known better than to lie there on his comforter, listening to his stomach growl and trying to tune out the pangs of hunger that dug their claws in everywhere that they could reach, feeling like he could somehow will his jeans to fit him properly by staying still and starving.

Reality wasn’t keen on obliging Shiro, but his own mind did him even worse. With each minute that he spent staring at the ceiling, he felt a sense of dread wash over him. It crashed on him in cold, hard, uncompromising waves, the same way that it’s doing now, as he grips his shaft tighter and strokes himself more quickly, trying to get off and get this over with. But instead of motivating Shiro, that fear might as well have pinned him to the bed. His lungs kept working and his heart kept beating and Shiro felt like he was trapped. Like he was frozen over, incapable of doing anything to help himself or anybody.

No matter what he tried to tell himself—in spite of his attempted reassurances that things weren’t hopeless, not even if he _had_ put on more weight than he thought and let himself get too fat to be allowed—Shiro felt like nothing about him worked. Nothing about him had ever fit in anywhere, and now, because he’d messed up so badly on his diet, nothing about him ever would. That thought made his stomach churn, not like it wanted him to feed it but more like he was going to be sick. His heartbeat couldn’t decide if it wanted to race until Shiro could no longer feel it or if it wanted to stagger out so slowly that he wondered if he was dead.

The minutes passed by, slower than molasses, and each one made it seem more certain that Shiro couldn’t manage anything. He couldn’t stick to a diet when _he_ had drawn it up and _he_ was the one who wanted to be on it. He couldn’t run without attracting mockery and feeling his entire body bouncing, jiggling, chafing on itself because there was simply too much of Shiro and it wasn’t like gravity would let him off the hook. He couldn’t make the number on the scale’s readout go anything but up. He couldn’t lose the disgusting rolls of flab that cocooned his entire body and he couldn’t fit into his favorite jeans because he’d let them grow even bigger. He couldn’t brush off insults like Ryou and when he tried, Shiro wound up crying like a baby.

All of which was Shiro’s fault alone because who else could’ve been responsible for it? His classmates wouldn’t have bullied him if he’d been thinner. They would’ve left him alone if he could’ve kept his weight down, even if he’d stayed under the two-hundred-pound mark. If he’d shaken them off more, then maybe he would’ve stuck to his plan much better. Maybe, if he hadn’t cared so much what other people thought of him or what they said or how they tried so hard to make him miserable, he would’ve strengthened his resolve and saved himself so many years of dieting, failure, and gaining weight until he might as well have resigned himself to being a hippopotamic land-mass because who could’ve blamed him for giving up when he tipped the scales at four-hundred-and-twenty-five pounds?

Hell, in all likelihood that Shiro could make out at the moment? He’d ruined himself so much, he couldn’t even sit up. Not on his own. Not anymore. His head was swamped down with too many feelings for him to parse through and his entire body felt impossibly heavy. Not simply fat, but completely laden down with something more than Shiro’s extra weight—which would have been enough without the help it got from his head and from his traitorous emotions. But Shiro couldn’t blame them for insisting upon themselves, the way they did. For rearing their heads and baring their teeth and trying to rip him apart from the inside out. Everything about the situation begged his feelings to lash out like that, goaded them into tormenting Shiro until he felt like he couldn’t move.

Even though Shiro kept lying on his back, his belly stuck up before him in a round, horrific, swollen, pudgy curve. Even though he hadn’t eaten anything in nearly twenty-four hours, his gut stubbornly protruded as if reaching for the ceiling and his t-shirt rode up in a way that would have exposed his skin. Even though gravity should’ve helped him look a little slimmer, sucking in as hard as he could manage still didn’t let Shiro think he’d ever get his stomach flat, the way he wanted. Everything suggested that he’d always stay locked in a body that he hated.

Watching his belly move was even worse than simply looking at how gross, and _soft_, and **_fat_** it was. Watching the way that his blubber rose and fell with every breath, Shiro felt ever nerve in his body squirming and twisting like they could never stop—

(A knock on the door jerks Shiro from his thoughts. He chokes down any gasping, but can’t help the impulse that screams at him to run. Since he can’t make a break for anything, he pushes himself as far back into the corner as he can. Tries not to move a muscle. Tries to will himself into standing statue-still.

It’s stupid—so, _so_ unspeakably freaking stupid, so stupid that it hurts—but some part of him feels like he’ll help himself if he stays still. If he doesn’t move, then maybe nobody will see him. Nobody will see the way that his stomach spills out like someone toppled over a bowl of melted ice cream, the way that every part of him bulges against his skin, so thick with fat that he nearly exceeds the limits of what his body will allow itself to handle—

No, no, no. That isn’t true. Not anymore. Shiro splays his free hand against his abs, just to remind himself that it isn’t true. He doesn’t have a gut like that anymore. His weight’s down to somewhere healthy, and so is his body fat percentage. Not just to a number that he likes alright, but to a range that has an Actual Medical Doctor’s seal of approval. His waistline has gotten trimmer than Shiro expected he could get, back when his diet started. There’s nothing left for him to hate about his body. Nothing left for him to hide.

Shiro’s holding his breath when the door creaks open. He doesn’t let it out until someone ignores him and goes right to taking a leak. He didn’t give the interloper permission to come in while he’s still naked, but what’s the point in arguing. At least the shower curtain helps him maintain some kind of modesty. He slackens his grip on his cock, in the hopes that he won’t out himself to whichever roommate has decided to invite himself in.

There’s nothing for Shiro to be afraid of. Hunk and Keith have masturbated in the shower enough that neither of them can judge him. One of their first _Discussions_ after they all moved in together was about the proper etiquette and cleanup after jerking off in this particular shared space. But Shiro can’t let either of them figure out that this is what he does with himself after grinding on Keith’s hips until he creamed his boxer-briefs, from giving him such a thorough verbal dressing-down about how much weight he’s gained and making him squirm, from telling him things that Shiro normally would never say to anybody but himself—

He gasps softly when the interloper knocks on the bathroom wall. His head perks up and his eyes go wide—but he doesn’t groan or moan or anything, so maybe he’s still in the clear. He could still have this handled, if he plays his cards right.

After a too-long moment of silence, the interloper sighs. A Keith sigh, not a Hunk one. Shiro lets himself slump against his corner, but instead of going slack, maybe he should stay on-edge. On-guard. Whichever term, he isn’t sure. He can’t even tell if he’s grateful for _Keith_ being the one to intrude while he’s in here with his hand around his dick.

“Shiro?” Keith’s voice is soft, gentle. Like he’s talking to a scared animal, trying to calm it down. “You okay?”

“Uh huh,” comes out of Shiro and makes his whole mouth taste like lying. “I’m fine, just—what about you? Are _you_ okay?”

“I’m not the one who bolted to a shower that hasn’t even fogged the mirror yet.”

Shiro cringes, relieved that Keith can’t see him doing so. “It’s not like… I didn’t feel like doing that today? It… It’s something Lance was telling me earlier? Apparently, it’s really bad for your skin to take too many hot showers. Especially in winter. Makes it dry out faster.”

Technically, Lance told him so last weekend. Splitting hairs even further, Lance was saying that about _himself_ and his own showering habits. He also brought it up with prompting, in response to Ryou complaining slightly about how Lance’s new favorite skincare ritual meant that Ryou sometimes becomes a glorified space-heater that happens to be vaguely boyfriend-shaped.

But Lance _did_ tell Shiro about this earlier, which means he isn’t _really_ lying.

Keith hums pensively, and it sounds like he slouches on the wall, closer to where Shiro’s standing. Letting his eyes slip shut, Shiro can picture how Keith might look: he’ll have changed into clean underwear after cleaning himself up. He’s probably in a t-shirt that _fits_ him, more or less, but stubbornly rides up on his soft, plush, chubby stomach. Whether he’s in pajama pants or not, he’s probably got a roll of pudge out on display. At least, he’ll have _something_ peeking out from under the hem of his shirt because he’s at home now, and he doesn’t need to concern himself with workplace dress codes or what anybody else thinks when he flaunts the way his clothes don’t fit.

All of which makes Shiro’s hand tighten around his shaft again—but thankfully, he chokes down on any telltale sounds before they dare to start.

Blessedly, he can picture several reasons why Keith probably wouldn’t want Shiro fantasizing about him, at the moment. Not in the way that Shiro’s been trying to stick to, now. He can imagine the way Keith could clench his jaw, thanks to Shiro screwing up at _something_ in a way that makes him worry. He probably has his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes trained on the floor. He might very well have his eyes closed, too.

Which is _fine _—and normally, it would at least look _cute _—but Shiro needs Keith to _not be in here_ so he can finish jerking off. “I’m fine, alright,” he promises because it _should_ be true, even if it maybe isn’t. “I got… Got a little worked up, but? Nothing really noteworthy—”

“I don’t care how long you need to shower, Kashi.” Keith heaves a sigh and it sounds like he knocks his head back against the wall. On the positive side, it _doesn’t_ sound like he whanged himself hard enough to really hurt. But on the other hand, Keith’s voice is almost meek as he points out, “I’m a little concerned about the _cold_ shower aspect, though. Because maybe Lance is _right_ about it being better for your skin—”

“Ryou and Allura swear that it’s working wonders for him—”

“—But _Lance_ doesn’t have your history with cold showers.” Keith huffs. He hesitates, and when Shiro doesn’t come up with a response for him, he scuffs his foot along the bath-mat. “Look, I’m sorry, Shiro, but the fact is? I’m probably never gonna get over that thing, the one time from right before you started seeing Ulaz? With you… putting yourself through cold showers because you were on another stupid diet and thought that it’d burn more calories—”

“I mean, it wasn’t a matter of what I _thought_. The science on that scheme checks out fine, I’m…”

Shiro cuts himself off, gnawing on his lip. He takes a deep breath to steady himself, knowing what needs to happen next. He dug this hole, and as he blinks up at the shower-head, Shiro has to put things right again. Preferably as soon as possible.

“…I’m sorry, Keith. I didn’t… I wasn’t trying to be glib, or flippant, not when you’re being—”

“I know you weren’t trying to do that. But that doesn’t make me any less concerned.”

Shiro nods, because he needs to remind himself that Keith is right for feeling like that. “You don’t have any reason for concern this time, I promise.” He shoves his white fringe back from where the water’s plastered it to his forehead. “I’m almost done in here… And I wasn’t trying to… I didn’t even _think_ of what you’re thinking that I did…”

Keith goes quiet, no doubt pondering things. Whatever clothes he’s wearing scrape along the wallpaper like he’s shifting his weight from foot to foot. Or maybe like he’s trying to shake his belly because he takes some kind of comfort in the way it moves. Shiro doesn’t understand what Keith gets out of doing things like that, or how he can be so happy with his size and all the places where he bulges with his newfound chub, or why he loves his jiggling flab almost as much as Shiro does when he’s the one who has to live with it sticking to his body—but if Keith’s happy? Then Shiro doesn’t need to understand.

“That’s good,” Keith decides. From how he’s speaking, Shiro would bet money that Keith is stroking his own belly. “It’s really, _really_ good that this isn’t like that… I mean, I didn’t want to think it was? Not with how you’ve been talking about the smaller changes adding up, instead of being on some big, grand plan of a diet—”

“If I ever pull a stunt like that again, you can call me out. Then, go tell everybody in The Gang and get them in on it, too.” Which… probably doesn’t soothe Keith’s mind as much as Shiro wants. Bucking into his hand, he bites down on a moan and makes himself tack on, “I’m done with that, okay? With skipping meals, and cold showers like you’re thinking of, and all of it. I’m never going back to making myself do things like I used to—”

“Thank God.” The relief in Keith’s sigh is warm and palpable. “Because you deserve so much better than that, y’know? And if your diet stays healthy and makes you happy? Then I’m all in with you, but…” Shuffling against the wall again, Keith makes a sound that Shiro can’t interpret for the life of him. “I can’t stand by and watch you punish yourself the way you used to. You can’t ask me to do that.”

_Nor would I do that to you… Not again_, Shiro bottles up inside his throat because he doesn’t deserve to make a promise like that, yet. He has too long a list of prior offenses, he hasn’t done the work to prove why he wouldn’t be lying, and he’s telling Keith too many half-truths tonight already. He _could_ keep pressing his luck; he’d probably get away with it. Except Keith deserves so much better than that, especially from Shiro.

He takes a deep breath, tries to find something else to say. But the only words that come to mind are, _I love you, Keith. I love you so much _—which have the benefit of being true, but are still about the mirror-opposite of helpful, at the moment.

The blank space where his brain’s supposed to be is telling. It’s all static and whiteness and a vacuum where his thoughts go, normally. It’s like Shiro’s gone beyond all hope of using language like a normal, functioning adult. Like what happens when he really _is_ closing in on his climax. That thought makes his heart flutter in hope—so much warm, intoxicating hope, washing over him so much that the shower’s water feels that much colder—because he might be able to get this over with already. Might untie the knots that have moved into the pit of his stomach, and get some kind of release.

God, he needs for that to happen. He can hold off on an orgasm for ages, when he puts his mind to it—but he should’ve been a goner as soon as he hit the shower. Things shouldn’t have gotten this bad. He shouldn’t be wilting here, desperately trying not to come while Keith’s still here to hear it, because he _should _have started washing his hair by now. Maybe even gotten so far as soaping up his body. Keith should’ve walked in on Shiro _actually taking a shower_, rather than using it as a thin veneer over top of his jerk-off session.

Why something inside of him is even making him hang on like this, Shiro doesn’t understand. Why can’t Shiro—

Pushing himself off the wall, Keith clears his throat. “Anyway… Come find me if you need anything? Or if you want it. Or for, y’know, any reason. Just because you’re always welcome in my room and I like having you around.”

Somehow, Shiro spits out an, _“Uh huh”_ for Keith, the way that he deserves to hear—but it feels more like a reflex than a deliberate choice on his part. It feels like something that bubbles up while he’s nodding, then refuses to let Shiro keep it on a lock-down.

“Hunk just got home… He says he wants to make us dinner, if we can work out what we want—”

“My meal plan’s on the fridge door. You guys can do what you like—”

“I think Hunk was kinda hoping that you’d be more flexible. I mean, grilled chicken and asparagus is great, if you really want it—”

“I _do_, okay? I can make it myself when I’m—”

“Nope.” Keith sighs in a way that reminds Shiro of a bird of prey who doesn’t appreciate being used as carrier pigeon when there’s a hunt to be had and he has infinitely better things to do than ferry messages for two people who won’t talk to each other without everything feeling like a potentially explosive mess. “Chef’s orders were specifically, and I quote: ‘Tell your idiot that he isn’t cooking for himself tonight and so help me, if he tries? I will drag him upstairs by his stupid ponytail and make Ryou deal with him so we don’t have to.’”

Trembling, Shiro looks toward the crack between the shower curtain and the wall. He can’t see Keith and his mind’s not coming up with anything particularly helpful. As he digs his shoulder-blades against the wall, his mouth grunts, “Hunk thinks that my ponytail’s stupid?”

“Right now, he seems to feel like pretty much _everything_ is stupid. Except for your brother and Prince Loser, I guess.” Keith grunts like he’s working a crick out of his back. As much as he deserves to give himself that kind of relief, Shiro wishes he would go find it _anywhere else but here_. With a snort, Keith tells him, “I think Hunk’s salty that _Lotor’s_ eaten more of his cooking than _we_ have lately. Which is, like… Understandable? Because sure, Lotor wants to be his boyfriend? But we actually live here…”

“Makes sense, I guess.” Shiro should not be able to pull off speaking right now, and he has no idea how he’s managing. There’s no way that he can be that strong when everything about him feels so impossibly weak. “Tell him I’m sorry for stifling his creative flair or something?”

Keith makes a throaty noise like Shiro just asked him to willingly let himself be mobbed by a horde of screaming K-pop fans. “Maybe there’s another option? Something less, ‘All or nothing’?” He knocks his head against the wall. “Could I give him permission to play around with spices a little? Or, I don’t know, to break out one of his vinaigrettes?”

Shiro considers that before he allows himself to nod again. Ignoring the knot of anxiety that presses out against the inside of his throat, he gives Keith another sound of affirmation. Tries to keep his grip loose around his cock, lest he do something asinine—maybe he’d shift the wrong way, or take too firm a hold around his shaft, or thrust too much into his hand—and undo himself while Keith could hear. God, Shiro _cannot _do that to himself, not when he’s already managed to hold off without outing himself to Keith.

As soon as the door closes behind Keith, Shiro groans. Forces himself to keep it as soft as possible. Slumped against his corner, Shiro tightens his grip and pumps his shaft. One time, two times, three times, four—keening softly, he flicks his wrist in the way that usually helps get him off. It should be enough, should push him over the edge and set him free—but not today. Not even when he _knows_ that Keith’s moved on and decided to stop listening.

Today, twisting hard around his cock unties no knots and quells no fires. Jerking in this way he’s practiced so many times doesn’t let Shiro hit his climax. Nothing feels like it’s helping get him closer to being finished, no matter how Shiro moves his hips or jerks his hand, no matter how much the urge—the need, the prickling, pent-up, burning _need _—to come is there, pressing right up on the back of neck. He can practically feel it breathing down his back, snarling at him that he can’t hold on forever, that he needs to let go already and allow himself to unravel before the longing tears him apart.

Yet, there’s nothing for it. None of Shiro’s efforts work him up enough or in the right way, the mysterious and unknown way that he must need right now. The desire claws around the top of Shiro’s spine, the pit of his stomach, the insides of his lungs. But Shiro’s still left waiting, like he’s right up on the edge of a cliff, staring down into an unfathomable darkness, wondering if he’s ever going to fall.

If he would just go limp instead of dragging this out, then that would be one thing. It would suck, yes, but Shiro could live with it quite easily. It wouldn’t be the first time that Shiro’s jerked off without an orgasm—but that doesn’t happen, either. His cock stays hard, refusing to let Shiro get out of this without bringing himself to orgasm. It’s like his body’s lashing out against him, which is anything but unprecedented.

Before California, his body resisted all his attempted diets by doubling down and making him get even fatter. Shiro only got to hold a _stable_ weight—or even drop a few pounds here and there if he got really, _really _lucky—when he wasn’t trying to slim down or turn his awful, sickeningly flabby belly into a more modest tummy, if not the rock-hard abs he’d longed to have since the first time he saw Hugh Jackman playing Wolverine.

He dodged the Freshman Fifteen because he was too busy with school to worry about his weight. But starting summer break at two-eighty-five bit him when he tried to push that loss even further. Instead of getting down to two-hundred-and-fifty pounds the way he planned, Shiro blubbered out to the biggest he’d ever been, tipped the scales at three-hundred-twenty-seven, and counted himself lucky that Lotor had a thing for fat guys.

Trying to lose weight after Ojiisan died knocked Shiro up past three-hundred-sixty-five, a point he never thought he could entirely come back from. Sure, he always _wished_ that he could be so lucky. But given his body’s history of defying him, he didn’t think he’d really get there. Out in California, it took months before he got used to seeing smaller numbers on his and Lotor’s scale.

His weight’s not the only way that his body’s ever refused to play nicely with him, either. When Shiro didn’t want to think he was in love with Keith, he’d pop boners in the middle of non-sexual situations because Keith laughed, or because he looked so hot in his tight black jeans and his old red jacket, or because he flipped his hair in the exact right way to overwhelm Shiro with feelings that refused to be denied.

After Ryou, Keith, and Adam told Ojiisan what had happened at his senior winter formal, Shiro got stuck with strep throat, mysterious aches, and a weird headache that wouldn’t quit ‘til he admitted how upset he was. Even then, he spent senior year getting knocked down with pain that he didn’t feel he deserved, all because he didn’t want to make Ojiisan worry about the things he heard at school, day in and day out, no matter what he did or how he dressed or how many times he gave up on lunch about halfway through because the hisses and the catcalls pretty much killed his appetite.

Since getting home, he’s tried to talk himself out of telling Keith the way he feels, so his body decided to give him Hanahaki that’s come back with a vengeance after briefly letting Shiro think that he was free and clear.

After all of that, why _wouldn’t_ Shiro’s body refuse to let him come as easily as he deserves?

Maybe if Shiro could focus, it would happen sooner. But when he closes his eyes, his mind doesn’t stick to the thoughts of Keith lying on the bed with his jeans undone and his. It bounces away from remembering how Keith whined while struggling with the fly. Shiro tries to zero in on how Keith’s body felt between his legs, beneath his hands, and tries to focus on the way Keith moaned so sweetly during the clip-shoot. But every time he redirects his thoughts to Keith, it’s like someone grabs him by the throat and jerks him back toward—)

In the end, Keith was the only reason why Shiro bothered sitting up, and that move still came out of nowhere.

He’d crammed himself into his formerly beloved, too-tight jeans and didn’t want to press his luck. Even without his belly pooching out into his lap, he could tell that his denial was going to get him nowhere. Still, moving sounded so _difficult _while everything felt so slow and heavy—vaguely, Shiro wondered if he was letting the hunger get to him unfairly, if he needed to force himself to sit so he could go find a distraction—and denial felt more comfortable than proof. He considered a nap, thinking he might escape needing to deal with the mess he’d made himself.

But then, something knocked against his bedroom window.

Shiro jolted out of his complacency, but not to sitting. By the time Keith, then nine years old and scrappy, had scaled the trellis and let himself in, Shiro had barely pulled himself up. He was huffing and puffing, not just from the effort itself but also from the toll his waistband took on his ability to breathe. Regardless, Shiro forced a smile, stretching his lips tighter than his flabby belly stretched his t-shirt, because he had no reason to be unhappy. At least, none that wouldn’t have made him feel ten times worse, had he admitted them out loud.

Brow furrowed, Keith lingered on the windowsill. “Shiro? You okay?” Swearing that he was doing great only served to make Keith frown. “Really? Because you don’t _seem_ like you’re okay? And I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t. I was just…” Shiro let his eyes dart around his room, trying to find something he could lie about having been up to. He squirmed when nothing made itself obvious. “I just had lunch. I was thinking about a nap but couldn’t make up my mind? Can… Can you get inside, please? It’s freezing out there.”

Keith supposed that that made sense, but once he had the window closed, he wrinkled his nose at Shiro’s wall. “Where’d your old jeans go?”

Cheeks heating up, Shiro ducked his chin. “I was just, um…”

_Nowhere_, Shiro thought—except that was stupid, since they weren’t hanging where they had.

_I got rid of them_, his mind threw at him—but Keith would’ve called that lie for what it was because he knew what those jeans meant to Shiro.

Shiro hated the way that looking down made the cheeks and jawline pooch out. He hated how this, in turn, made entire his face seem even fatter. More than that, though, he loathed the way that this confronted him with his big, fat gut. Just looking at the thing made Shiro’s blush go from warm to scalding hot, made his cheeks feel like they had to be turning scarlet.

The rotund, plumped up reflection that he cut in his full-length mirror was bad enough. But staring down at his stomach like this, all up-close and personal? Having this front row seat while his belly bulged over the waistband of his jeans, spilling out over it in a fleshy muffin-top and crushing the denim that struggled to contain this girth and straining the poor fasteners even further? Watching as he patted his middle and the flab yielded and squished beneath his fingertips? Seeing how big the roll of chub he pinched up truly was, with no room to lie to himself about it?

It all made Shiro sick. Made him feel like his insides were going to rush up his throat—and part of him didn’t mind that idea very much. As long as he vomited up whatever broken thing inside him made him such a fat-ass, Shiro didn’t think he cared at all.

Keith did, though, if the way leaned on Shiro’s side was any indication. “You don’t have to tell me where your jeans went if you don’t want to,” he said, letting his head loll onto Shiro’s shoulder. (Even if that gesture didn’t mean then what it does now, it still meant a lot. Keith didn’t get this open or affectionate with just anybody.) “I just wondered ’cause you liked them so much, I didn’t think you’d _want_ to get rid of them or—”

A _rrrrip! _and then a popping sound cut Keith off. Neither one was all that loud, but they made enough noise to snatch up Keith’s attention.

Down by their feet, the clatter of something metal on a hardwood floor sounded the way that Shiro imagined gunshots did. He bit down on his lip to keep from whining, but it probably didn’t matter if he held that back of not. The damage was already done. Not only that, but it was done in full view of a witness.

Not just _any_ witness, either, but _Keith_, who was_ Important_.

Rejection stung from other people. Other people’s contempt and taunting could wound Shiro badly. Being systematically ostracized from most of his peers left Shiro with what strikes most of his loved ones as a set of deep emotional scars. But even back then, getting anything like that from Keith would’ve knocked Shiro down and beaten the Hell out of him, then left him broken and bloody and dying in the nearest convenient ditch.

As Keith lifted his head, Shiro hunched his shoulders until his back groaned at him in protest, until his spine screamed at him to sit up straight, the way Obaasan taught him. He ducked his chin, no matter how chubby and gross it made his face look because he couldn’t handle staring at his reflection any longer. He tried to curl in on himself as though he could ever make himself look smaller. As if there was any way that he could hide from what had happened, from what he’d done and what he’d proven. Like Shiro could really lie to himself anymore about how he was going to make his diet work and how he hadn’t put on _that_ much weight.

There was no way for Shiro to hide what Keith found when he slipped down to the floor, either. Blinking bemusedly, his whole face a tangled mess of confusion and concern, Keith held up a copper button. The raised letters spelled out the name of the brand who’d made Shiro’s now-former favorite jeans. Holding his breath, Shiro waited for an onslaught of insults that he knew he well deserved—except Keith didn’t plan on giving it to him because no matter how much truth those jabs contained, Keith knew how much it hurt Shiro to keep hearing them.

Maybe avoiding the verbal reminder of what a massive, flabby tub of lard he’d let himself turn into would’ve been slightly easier for Shiro if Keith had looked at him with judgment or with condemnation. Except that had never been in the vicinity of the cards either because Keith was not a jerk like that. He didn’t even look at Shiro with pity; he just pursed his lips while worry made them quiver. His eyes went dewy, not because he was sad for his own sake but because there was nothing he could do for Shiro—which, in turn, made Shiro slouch even further.

Of course, this posture only made Shiro’s problem that much worse. It pushed his stomach toward his lap with enough force to make another, louder _rrrriiiiiiip!_-ing sound ring out. Shutting his eyes and cringing didn’t get Shiro out of facing this: without the button left in place, his zipper didn’t stand a chance. Without coming undone, it ripped clean off one side of his fly and only left fraying threads behind it. Even with how many times Obaasan had ever patched up clothes for him and Ryou before, there was no way that her expertise with a sewing machine could help Shiro, this time. That he could only blame himself for this made his blush seep off his cheeks, toward his neck, while something hot and thick welled up inside his throat.

Worse, the damage to his zipper left the way open for all of Shiro’s chub to break free and come slopping out. It happened quickly, but it didn’t feel like that. Gripping his bedsheets for dear life, Shiro felt like he was trapped in a slow-motion car crash.

Without looking at the damage, all he had were his feelings: the threads brushing against his stomach. The warm air licking at his exposed skin. The way his stomach could expand as he drew in breath and the thick, soft, blubbery rolls of flab that had settled on his midsection, all of them surging into his lap at once, pushing the hem of his t-shirt up and shoving the sides of his fly so apart that Shiro briefly forgot how he’d even gotten them to meet each other, tumbling out in a plushy, doughy, sick, _horrific _mass of fat.

Slumping forward made those pudgy rolls crunch up on each other, shoved them even further out into the open—but what was the point of decent posture? Keith had already watched while Shiro bust his pants wide open. He knew that Shiro had ballooned while supposedly on a diet. Even if he didn’t that Shiro gone from sorta chubby and maybe vaguely cute despite the extra weight he carried, to full-on fat and huge, with an enormous belly that literally destroyed his clothing.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Shiro whispered, face burning as he struggled to open up his eyes. “Can I have the button, please?”

Leaning toward Keith, Shiro held out a hand. As Keith dropped the button, though, another _rrrriiiip!_ _pop! _sliced through the air. These sounds were the loudest yet, and as he reclined, propping himself up on his palms, Shiro _knew_ what he was going to see. He had to suck in his stomach to get a clearer view, but he couldn’t mistake what he’d done this time. However he’d moved his legs has been the wrong way for him to do so. Shifting around had made his flabby thighs push out against the already-straining fabric. Unable to withstand the force, his jeans gave way. Both seams split open and mounds of pale tawny flesh came spilling out onto Shiro’s mattress.

Swallowing thickly, Shiro bowed his head. He should’ve had something to say. Some off-the-cuff remark that made this easier for Keith to witness and didn’t make him feel broken. But coming up with nothing, he fell silent and he stayed that way, even when Keith sighed, and settled on the floor, and put his head on Shiro’s thigh.

“I’m sorry about your jeans.” Keith rubbed his cheek on Shiro’s leg like a cat marking his territory. “I know you really liked them.”

“Don’t be sorry about my jeans. I don’t deserve it.” Which earned Shiro a deeply puzzled frown, which made his blush come back as hot and bright as ever, right when he’d thought he might get out of dealing with it. “I appreciate it, Keith, I do. But it’s my own _stupid_ fault that I got too fat for these—”

“You _aren’t_ fat!” Flushing pink, Keith screwed up a pout like he meant business. “Or if you are, who _cares_?”

Shiro shrugged. “Pretty much everybody—”

“Then _I’m_ not everybody and I don’t _wanna_ be.”

“Well, _I’m_ still everybody—”

“But _why_, Shiro? Everyone who’s in your _‘everybody’_ sounds like a total _asshole_!”

This made Shiro blush again, if mostly because he was older than Keith and he wouldn’t have dreamed of swearing so loudly that his grandparents, and Ryou, and probably half of the people on their block could hear. Obaasan always said that cuss words lost their meaning and significance if one used them too frequently, and that swearing too often made people take you for a fool. She was a respected poet and writer, which meant that she was probably right, as far as Shiro was concerned.

Squirming made his belly jiggle, and Shiro tried to tune it out. “_I care _about me being fat,” he bit out. “I don’t _like_ it, Keith. Getting stared at all the time. People whispering. And snickering. And picking at me all the time, no matter what I do. They make you feel wrong for _everything_. You might as well be worthless and it’s _awful_. So, I don’t want this for myself, okay?”

“But you _aren’t _wrong. And you aren’t _worthless_. You’re _so good_, and anyone who doesn’t get that—”

“Can you _blame them_ for what they tell me?” Shiro barked out a laugh, but not a happy one. Something about the sound made him think of broken glass. Something else inside of him felt like he was two steps off from crying. In the face of Keith’s confusion, Shiro groaned and gestured at his flabby stomach. “It’s not _just_ about my jeans, y’know? Look at me, Keith. They’re _right_, sometimes, with what they say—”

“No, they’re _fucking. _**_not_**—”

“They pick on me for being fat, but? It’s not like I can _argue_ them on that. I already _know _that I’m too fat for _anything_—”

“No, you _aren’t_.” Keith groaned and thumped his head against Shiro’s mattress. Whining and wrinkling his nose like a frustrated bunny, he folded his arms over his chest. “You wouldn’t say anything like that about _Ryou_. You wouldn’t say it about Laura or her little sister. You’ll get in fights if anybody runs their mouths about those two or any other fat kids. So why is it any different when you say it about _you_?”

“Because it _is_, okay? Just because nobody else deserves to hear it… It’s not like I’m… But we’re just?” Frustrated with his hair flopping onto his forehead, Shiro mirrored Keith, tilted his head back, spoke to the ceiling as he said, “No one else deserves to get picked on. But I don’t mind if it happens to me—”

“Except for all the ways that you don’t like it,” Keith pointed out. “So, _yeah_, you kinda do mind.”

“Except I _don’t _mind it happening to me, not really.” Shiro’s chuckle feels like he has long, jagged, monstrous claws scraping along the inside of his throat. “I may not _like_ it, but? At least they aren’t _completely_ wrong when they go after me. At least I _deserve_ what they say—”

“_You said_ that _nobody_ deserves to get bullied.” The roll of Keith’s eyes was audible, even if Shiro didn’t see him doing so. “And that’s not like me opting out of being an _everybody_ because I don’t care if you’re fat or not, and I don’t think they’re right in making fun of you—”

“Yeah, really? Because they sorta sound the same—”

“Except they’re _not_ the same. Because _I’m _**_not_** making fun of you. I’m not doing that. But you, you’re just…” Grumbling as he racked his brain for the words he wanted, Keith dropped his head back onto Shiro’s leg. “The difference is: I’m saying that I _won’t _hurt you. _You’re_ saying that you deserve to be in pain because of other people’s dumb opinions.”

“Dumb opinions that I happen to _agree_ with, in my case.” Getting another befuddled frown, Shiro could only shrug. “I’m not saying that I _like_ what they say to me? Obviously, I don’t. But I _am_ fat, so that’s fair game. And some of the other stuff…” He shook his head and hoped that his voice wouldn’t crack, that he wouldn’t break down and start crying. “I mean? How could anybody look at me and _not_ think that I’m _disgusting_.”

Silently, Keith scrambled around and flopped down between Shiro’s feet. Jaw set and eyes blazing with determination, he forced himself to look Shiro in the eye. Still took him a moment before he was ready to talk, but trying to make Keith talk before he wanted to? Was usually a one-way ticket to making him shut down on you. Besides, too many people in Keith’s life had pulled stunts like that with him, trying to force him to be whoever they wanted instead of taking the amazing person that he was. Whatever happened, whatever either of them did, and however long this friendship lasted? Shiro didn’t want to be one of those people.

Squeezing Shiro’s ankle like he would’ve done with Shiro’s shoulder, Keith got the most earnest, glimmering look on his face. It almost made Shiro go there with him, almost made him dare to hope that what Keith had to say would magically fix everything.

Instead, Keith kept giving him that _look _—the one that believed in Shiro more than he deserved, even if Keith would have disagreed—and he told Shiro, “You’re not disgusting. Nothing about you’s like that.”

“I’m over two-hundred-fifty pounds, okay? That _feels_ pretty disgusting, Keith.” As if on cue, Shiro’s stomach decided that it was high time to growl and remind him that he still hadn’t given it any food. “And see what I mean? I’m already a total _whale_, and I’m only getting fatter, and my big, fat _gut_ won’t let me _stay _on a_ stupid_ _diet_ until lose all the weight I want to lose.”

Huffing, Shiro blew some stray hair off his forehead. “All I want is to get skinny like a _normal_ person. But my belly keeps _doing that_ instead of _letting me_ have a break. Why can’t this just _stop_? Why is this happening? Why can’t I be a _normal person_, just like everybody else?”

Keith narrowed his eyes, pensively and coolly but somehow, he didn’t come off looking harsh. “Normal people _suck_, though, Shiro. _Normal people_ are the ones who tell you that you’re garbage ’cause you aren’t skinny—”

“Which I don’t think they’re wrong about—”

“Except for how they _are_, but fine!” Glowering up at Shiro, Keith either didn’t care or didn’t notice that his voice was raising. “**_Normal _**_people _are the ones who say that _I’m_ a freak because I love my dads and I don’t think they’re wrong for being gay. Or that _you’re_ wrong for being gay. So, literally _why_ would you want anything to do with **_normal _**_people_ when they’re stupid, and they’re _wrong_, and they’re _awful_? And they’re always like that, _all the time_?”

Keith briefly allowed himself to smirk, probably because he _knew_ that Shiro wouldn’t fight him on that argument. But his expression got almost sour as he prodded with, “And I think your stomach growls like that because you’re _hungry_? So, did you _actually_ have lunch, or what?”

Shiro blushed and shook his head. “But I ate a _ton_ yesterday, so I didn’t think—”

“You still have to eat _today_, Shiro. Come on, I _know_ you aren’t that stupid.”

Sniffing, Shiro quirked his shoulders. “Maybe so. But right now, I’d sure trade in being smart if it meant I didn’t have to feel so _ugly_, and _broken_, and _disgusting._”

Keith openly rolled his eyes, but Shiro couldn’t blame him for that. “The people who think you’re gross for how you look? They don’t deserve you. They’re _stupid_. And _they’re_ the real garbage. And I’m sorry that they make you feel the same way they do, but _come on_. You shouldn’t even waste time thinking about them—”

“It’s not like they give me that much of a choice—”

“You _have one_, though. You’ve got choices. You don’t _have_ to think about them. Or listen to anything they say. Or let them wear you down like that.” This sounded like so many similar lectures that Shiro had ever gotten from Ryou on the subject—but Keith slouched as if he had the unspoken _but_ hanging on his shoulders like a millstone. “But I get it, though. They don’t know anything, but they keep talking. They act like you’re just there for them to play with and you hate it—”

Shiro sighed. “You have way more reason to be upset about kids at school giving you a hard time, Keith.”

Which wasn’t an issue of Shiro dismissing his own problems; he was simply stating facts. Maybe he got harassed on a daily basis for being fat, but that was something that he could’ve _helped_, if he’d simply steeled himself up and gotten himself together _before_ getting to age twenty-six. He wouldn’t have suffered so much if he’d figured things out sooner instead of getting as horribly, sickeningly huge as he was when he and Lotor first got to California. Shiro could’ve prevented his own suffering by simply not being one of the fat kids in his class, or at least having the self-control to not get any fatter.

Keith, though? He got harassed for being adopted and, as far as anybody knew, an orphan. Kids picked at him up one side and down the other for things he did that, according to the therapist he saw every other week, were part of him being on the autistic spectrum. His classmates tried to rip him an infinitude of new ones for having two adoptive fathers. Then, when Keith didn’t see a problem with Kolivan and Antok being gay, his classmates went in on him for that instead. Where Shiro’s bullies went at him for things that were well within his control, even though he went about handling them wrong, Keith’s bullies were homophobic, anti-autistic little shits who _genuinely_ needed to be stopped.

Not that Keith would’ve entirely agreed with this—but his problem with how Shiro felt was the tacit assumption that his bullies didn’t deserve to be punished for how they picked on him. Just like how he didn’t agree with Shiro’s next point, the point about how Obaasan and Aunt Satomi always told him that there was a bigger world waiting out there, after middle school and high school. There was a better, brighter life ahead of Shiro, one where he could have more freedom to express himself, and to experience life as a young gay man. Granted, neither of them promised him perfection and Shiro didn’t expect that. But he was more concerned with the fact that gay men, as far as he could tell, did not come in his size.

Which Keith thought was an example of Shiro being stupid and stubborn because, as he pointed out, Antok was not exactly small. When Shiro failed to just agree with him, much less stop wistfully sighing over his posters of George Michael and James Dean in _Rebel Without A Cause_, Keith made him put on a pair of sweats that fit. He dragged Shiro downstairs by the wrist, held up briefly so that he could put his sneakers on, and then hauled Shiro across the property line to Kolivan and Antok’s kitchen, so his Dads could give him a Talking To about the fact there was room in the world for fat gay men.

Keith would disagree with pretty much everything that Shiro’s on about this evening, too. The day that’s dogging Shiro’s memory—with the busted jeans and Keith climbing in his window to witness them coming apart—it wasn’t even their _first_ conversation about anything that Shiro dealt with, between his weight problem and the kids at school who made his life a living Hell about it. It wouldn’t be their last, either. They’d finish school, then finish college, and still find themselves having _talks_ about that.

Every time, Keith would understand but still disagree with Shiro about _something_, usually insisting that Shiro deserved better than dealing with the consequences for his own choices. Tonight, if Keith didn’t get hung up on the part where Shiro got hot in the first place while they were shooting that clip together? Then he’d no doubt disagree with Shiro’s completely correct conclusion that something must be very wrong with him for getting turned on by watching Keith struggle with his jeans like that.

It’s bad enough—well and truly _terrible_ enough—for Shiro to have been turned by watching that happen to other guys. It’s so much worse for him to have wanted anything like that for Keith. To get all choked up while watching Keith struggle with something that Shiro _knows_ is horrible, something that almost _destroyed_ him, every time it happened to him. Getting too fat for his jeans never got any better. Never got any easier. Never stopped making Shiro wish that he could’ve crawled into the nearest hole and never come back out again.

As he whines into another thrust—as he twists his hand around his shaft, lips trembling in the same way that his fingers tremble on his cock—Shiro can’t focus on the thoughts of Keith. Can’t turn his mind away from everything that’s wrong with what turns him on and gets him off. His pulse ratchets up. His strokes get shorter, harder, and more desperate. Only one thing comes to mind. One thing, two words:

“Disgusting,” Shiro whispers, eyes clenched shut and head lolling back against the cold, wet wall. “I’m _disgusting_…”

That’s what does it. Admitting that—saying it out loud—pushes Shiro over the edge. It unknots everything that’s been building up inside of him. His entire body tenses, every muscle pulling itself bowstring taut. His knees wobble, threaten to give out beneath him. Thank God for the wall. For the cool tiles. For the freezing water that smacks into Shiro’s chest and keeps him from spontaneously combusting. That might still happen, if he stays so hot and flushed and mired in heat

One more flick of the wrist. He chokes down a moan. Again, he whimpers, “I’m _disgusting_…”

Shiro gasps, but doesn’t allow himself anything louder. For a moment, everything flares up inside of him, white hot and rushing for release. When that subsides, Shiro’s cock is limp and he has a sticky, off-white spider-web of cum strewn across his hand.

Because of course confessing to an empty bathroom—naming himself for what he is—that’s what gets Shiro off. _Of course_ it is. Because he really needed another reason why he’s sick and broken, really needed anything else to be irreparably wrong with him. Because getting abs hasn’t magically made him stop being totally fucked up.

Fighting the impulse to cringe, Shiro watches the shower fail to wash away the entire mess he’s made. Swallowing any Hanahaki coughs before they can properly get started, he cleans up his hand, and then his hair, and then his body.

His chest feels heavy, though, through all of this. Tight, like he has a nest of vipers twisting around his lungs. And finishing the shower doesn’t make any of that ease up. By the time he stumbles out into the apartment—cloaked in a black t-shirt and pajama pants, with his hair wrapped in a towel—Shiro knows what’s going on and he knows what to do. This hasn’t happened for a while but unfortunately, the procedure’s still like second nature to him.

Getting a glass of water from the kitchen, Shiro doesn’t really listen to what Hunk and Keith are on about. Probably dinner, like Keith said before. But Keith takes one look at Shiro’s face and nods because he _knows_. Without words, he tells Shiro to go help himself and promises to come check in on him in a while.

Under the soft lighting of his bedroom, Shiro can barely make his hands stop shaking. Almost doesn’t open up the bottle that he needs. But once he’s gotten his Xanax down and drained the glass of water, Shiro crawls in to slouch against his headboard. Uncomprehendingly, he blinks up at his three purple paper lanterns, only one of which is currently lit up. Keeping his breaths as slow and deep and even as he can, he reaches up to poke at one of the black string lights above his bed. He pokes one of the white frosted bulbs next, wrinkles his nose when it flickers, then goes out.

The boxes of replacement bulbs are over in his closet. Replacing this one wouldn’t be that taxing. But as he stares at the burnt out bulb, Shiro feels something inside him stretching like it means to snap. Like he’s going to crack at any second. What he’s feeling is stupid and irrational, he knows—but Shiro could break all of his replacement bulbs if he gets up to move and then starts crying.

The only thing that he can do is curl up on his side and bury his face in his stuffed black lion.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Sheith talk about Feelings, confessions are made, Keith calls Shiro out on being an idiot about how he needs aftercare and to actually use his fucking safe-words, they talk about some of Shiro’s experiences with bullying (including one family anecdote that isn’t bullying so much as Shiro’s dad being unwittingly insensitive), and Keith and Hunk……
> 
> Well, they sure talk about a lot of things. Unfortunately, Hunk is pretty In His Feelings about a lot of things, so it’s not an easy conversation for either of them.

Shiro doesn’t know how long he spends in his bed, clutching his lion to his chest and burying his face in the back of its head. If he’d thought to turn on some music, it might’ve helped him keep track of time. But he didn’t, so who knows what’s even going on. Time could go on about to midnight and Shiro would be none the wiser.

He gasps into his lion’s mane, the first time that his door creaks open. His nerves only stop trying to set themselves on fire—he only gets slammed by a wave of relief—when he sees that the face peeking in belongs to Hunk. Okay, that’s good. Round-faced, broad-shouldered Hunk, who is a friend and not going to hurt Shiro, even if that’s what he deserves for being such a heel. Hunk is good, he’s fine, he’s safe, he’s…

He’s glowering at Shiro, with his lips pursed and a dead-eyed look that makes Shiro wish he were back downstairs by the vending machines. If he left his wallet up here, then he couldn’t breakdown and binge on Cheetos. And he’d be away from everyone. He couldn’t hurt them—

“Dinner’s on.” Hunk heaves a sigh. “Are you gonna be joining us or not.”

Shiro swallows thickly and cuddles his lion even closer. “Dunno.”

Hunk sighs but it sounds like he doesn’t want to. “Okay, I made one thing for me and Keith, and you probably don’t want it. But I stuck to your meal plan from the fridge door, okay? You won’t throw off your entire week or whatever you’re worrying about right now.”

“‘m not worried,” Shiro mumbles into his lion’s mane. He shakes his head at nothing in particular. “It’s nothing—”

“Dude, with _you_? Trying to skip dinner can _never_ just be ‘nothing.’”

“I’m not _trying_ to skip dinner, man. I’ll come, I promise—”

“Just like you _promised_ that you’d keep doing all your self-love work in California?”

Hunk’s voice hits Shiro like getting smacked upside the head with a comically oversized toy swordfish. It’s worse than hearing him balk when Shiro didn’t like that creepy guy from the gym. Nearly but not quite as bad as the party when Shiro and Lotor first got back from California. There’s a cold, hard edge to it that doesn’t match the almost-sympathetic half-smile that Hunk’s forcing himself to wear. His eyes gleam like he wants Shiro to believe that he understands, that he isn’t judging or condemning Shiro for anything—but when he clears his throat, the noise makes Shiro flinch.

It sounds like Hunk wishes he could get away with slapping Shiro.

Which is _stupid_, Shiro knows that. Nothing weird is going on. Nothing harmful. He can trust that Hunk’s concern is genuine.

Curling his legs up to his chest, cuddling his lion like letting go of it might kill him, Shiro quirks his shoulders. “I’m not feeling so hot,” he says, trying to keep his eyes from slipping closed. It might be easier if his Xanax would decide to work already, instead of teasing like it’s going to eventually, then giving him basically nothing in the way of relief. “Already took my meds. Talk to Keith, he’ll tell you—”

“Okay, however you feel, man? And whatever light Keith can shed on it for me? You _know_ what I’m gonna read into things if you don’t get up and come to dinner.” Hunk squints at Shiro like he’s searching for any sign that Shiro’s yanking his chain. Or maybe a sign that Shiro plans on listening to him and prying himself out of bed. “Come on. It’s one thing for my nieces and Lance’s to make me go, ‘If you don’t do what I want by the time I count to ten.’ They’re all _kids_, man. The oldest one is _seven_. You’re almost twenty-eight. Now, get up and come have dinner.”

“_On my own time_, okay?”

“No. Not okay. Not with how many times you’ve said that shit without meaning it.” Whatever he finds or doesn’t in scrutinizing Shiro like this, Hunk heaves a sigh that sounds like it takes the wind out of his entire chest. “Shiro, if you do this? If you don’t get up, come to the kitchen with me, and have dinner? If you _skip_ it like this, even knowing that you’re gonna make me read into stuff and worry? Then I’m _gonna_ tell Ryou about it. I’m _gonna_ tell Lotor—”

“Of course you are.” Shiro rolls onto his back, rolls his neck around on his damp, splayed out hair. Maybe it’s rude that he won’t even look at Hunk right now, when they’re having a serious conversation—but whatever. “I can’t stop you, man. Tell them anything you want.”

Immature? Probably. Unhelpful? Definitely. But thank God, the ceiling isn’t judging Shiro, even though he deserves it.

At least, he avoids judgment until Hunk leans over him.

Worse than standing between Shiro and his escapism, Hunk’s glaring but his face is limp, half-hearted. Swallowing a groan, Shiro turns his face away. But the view of Hunk’s body isn’t any better, though. His t-shirts hangs on him, only letting Shiro see hints of Hunk’s belly pressing out against the fabric. So, Hunk might be on a diet of his own. Unlikely, considering that he was the second member of The Gang to ever catch Shiro in a lie about skipping meals (after Lotor, while excluding Keith and Ryou because they’re a pair of outliers), and he’s been in a _Mood_ about Shiro’s eating habits for the past five weeks, and Hunk would absolutely forego his own desires in the name of making a passive-aggressive point. Still, Hunk trying to lose weight isn’t entirely out of the question. Either that, or it’s a shirt that Hunk deliberately bought to fit him loosely.

As if he knows what Shiro’s considering, Hunk clears his throat. He makes throaty, discontented noises until Shiro looks back up at him.

“Dude, _please_. Don’t do this.” Hunk meets Shiro’s long, flat expression with one of his own, all pursed lips and eyes like he’s trying to put Shiro under a microscope. Vaguely, Shiro thinks he can see Hunk faltering but that makes no sense whatsoever. Why would Hunk have any reason to hesitate when he believes he’s in the right? “Come on. Dinner. _Now_.”

Shiro thinks about it before he shakes his head, but that’s probably no comfort for Hunk.

“You promised you’ve been working on this. On _not_ doing things like this, I mean.” Hunk squares his shoulders like he’s trying to be intimidating. Mostly, he kicks Shiro in the chest with guilt. “Look, if you’re not gonna come for the sake of taking care of yourself? Come because I did the work of cooking and you don’t want to—”

Shiro groans over top of Hunk. He hates what an idiot he sounds like, but—

“Oh, come _on_!” Screwing up his face, Hunk stomps his foot. While Shiro flinches, Hunk huffs at him, “I’ve got a size advantage on you now _and_ I freaking_ lift_. Get up and come to dinner or I will bodily carry you to the—”

A bang on the door. Then, Keith asks for their attention. Slouching against the threshold, Keith’s changed into a pair of red plaid pajama bottoms and a Dolly Parton t-shirt that must be fairly new. Or anyway, it isn’t _that_ tight on him—the fabric doesn’t cling too much but also doesn’t completely conceal his figure—and the hem doesn’t ride up on his belly.

Eyes narrowed at Hunk, Keith sighs. “I know you think you’re helping, but can we _talk_ about this. _Please_?”

“I’m _trying _to talk about it, man! But Shiro’s being stubborn—”

“Yeah, because anyone in this apartment can judge each other for that.” Keith glowers, and even from here, Shiro can see the way his eyes flash like, _“Do not test me, Hawea Garrett.” _The way he hunches his shoulders looks like a cat getting ready to attack. “I want to talk to you. Right now, without Shiro, because he needs some space. And because this situation _is not_ what you think it is.”

Flipping his bangs off his face, Keith huffs. “I’ll bring Shiro dinner later if he doesn’t get up on his own. _Please _come and hear me out.”

It takes Hunk a moment before, rolling his eyes, he decides to slink back toward the kitchen.

As he goes, Shiro catches Keith’s gaze. He wishes he could make his voice work right now, because Keith deserves that much. But for now, Shiro settles for looking at him—taking in the details of his face as if it’s the first time—and mouthing, _“Thank you.”_

* * *

Shiro loses track of time again, but by the time Keith comes back, it doesn’t _feel_ like it’s been too terribly long. Enough time for him to eat his own dinner, going by what he said to Hunk—but depending on what Hunk made them, that could mean a lot of different things. Over by the bed, Keith steps enough into the light that Shiro can tell how that t-shirt’s falling on his belly… No more tightly than before, he thinks? So, Keith probably isn’t even bloated, much less stuffed.

Probably the biggest clue is that Shiro sits up without too much trouble when Keith asks him if he can. He doesn’t feel like his head is spinning when Keith asks if he feels up to eating dinner… His heart is beating at what feels like a far more reasonable pace and without banging around like it intends to break free from Shiro’s chest… He doesn’t have that sensation like he has vines twisting up around his lungs and trying to strangle him from the inside out… When Keith hands over the plate he’s carrying, Shiro takes it without question…

His Xanax has finally kicked in. That’s good.

The mattress shifts as Keith sits down beside him. Not enough to be a huge upset, but given that it’s Keith? He could completely flip the mattress over while Shiro’s sitting on it, and Shiro would forgive him, whether or not he understood why Keith felt a need to do that.

In a gesture of something that approximates cooperation, Shiro folds his legs up crosswise and tries to get his dinner down. Hunk compromised his own desires to stick to Shiro’s weekly meal plan, even though Shiro’s been letting that fall by the wayside more than he did back in Los Angeles. The first bite of grilled chicken says that Hunk _definitely_ improvised with sauce and spices—they’re too mixed up for Shiro to tell exactly what Hunk did, but he only planned to use a bit of extra virgin olive oil, some pepper, and maybe a bit of garlic—but Shiro doesn’t mind. Of course, Hunk’s experiment tastes perfectly fine.

“How are you feeling,” Keith says while Shiro’s picking at his asparagus. “And if that doesn’t sound like a question, uh… Well, it probably shouldn’t? Because I can _tell_ that you’re feeling pretty bad, but…” Slouching against Shiro’s headboard, Keith shrugs and completely fails to look casual. “I wanna hear it in your own words, though?”

“Yeah, at least you and Lotor still care about my own words.” Shaking his head, Shiro lets Keith needle him about what the Hell that’s supposed to mean. He owes Keith an answer, yes—but he eats a stalk and a half before he tries to give Keith that. “I just mean… Ryou listens to my side, obviously. He listens as well as you and Lotor do. But it’s like he already knows what he believes, so nothing I have to say makes any difference. And when it _does_ make a difference, it’s not in the way I _want_. Allura wants to help, but…”

_But she wants to help us get together, which is _ ** _not _ ** _what I think she should be helping with._

Whatever Keith picks up on from the way Shiro trails off, or from the fork scraping along the plate, he snorts. “But she thinks that she knows what’s best for you even more than you do? And she assumes that she knows what you need? And she doesn’t exactly like being confronted with the evidence of how she isn’t always right?”

“Mmm, you said it, not me.” Which gets Shiro to smirk somewhat, for all it fades as he pokes his fork back in the chicken. “Then, Hunk’s still mad at me and I have no idea _why_ because he won’t tell me. And I thought that he just needed _space_ for a while, so I tried to give him that, but…” Shiro quirks his shoulders. Forces himself to take down a bite of the meat. “It’s so stupid—”

“Well, I wanna hear about it anyway. No matter how stupid you think it is.”

“I didn’t _say _that I wouldn’t tell you about it, but… It’s still stupid. Me and Hunk both, I mean.”

Part of him says that he should focus on how he’s eating. But looking at Keith sounds better. So much better. Sighing softly, Shiro edges around so he can take in more of Keith’s face. It puts distance between their bodies—leaves him leaning his shoulder against the headboard, rather than his back—but God, it’s worth it for a chance to look at Keith. The soft lighting plays on his face so sweetly, making it look as if his cheeks are lighting up. They probably aren’t, not for real, but it’s nice to dream that they are.

Anyway, even if Keith _isn’t _lighting up like that, his face is beautiful. Unfairly so. His eyes have gone all wide and soft, the way that they so often do around Shiro. He isn’t smiling because there’s nothing to smile about right now—but he still manages to give Shiro a _Look_ that feels like a hug.

When he’s ready, Shiro huffs, blows at his white fringe. “Hunk’s mad at me. It has _something_ to do with me losing weight. Based on how he was before, I’d guess that he’s mad because I lost weight at all and he thinks that it’s…”

His fork clinks against the porcelain. With that hand freed up, Shiro flicks his wrist as if this will somehow summon up the word he wants.

Stiffening, Keith shifts and sits up straighter. “Like, he thinks that you’re doing the stuff you used to do that walked, talked, smelled, and quacked a lot like an eating disorder?” He frowns sympathetically when Shiro flinches at those words and gently squeezes Shiro’s knee. “Look, I know you don’t like hearing me say that… But has it actually helped you to _not_ call it what it is?”

“What it _could _have been.” Shiro picks up his fork, since he’s gonna be insisting on that anyway. “Ulaz never said that I _had_ an eating disorder—”

“He said that the DSM guidelines were so convoluted and could be so finicky about recognizing the truth for bigger clients—”

“For _obese_ patients. _Morbidly _obese, if we’re calling things what they’re supposed to be. That’s what I _was_, so—”

“Shiro, the only thing about you that’s morbid is your sense of humor. And the way you can get all like, ‘Oooh, this thing is happening and I don’t like it, oh no, I’m mild-to-moderately inconvenienced, and that makes me feel like my spleen is rupturing and I am literally going to die of sepsis right here in the bookstore or wherever.’ I _know_ that it’s a coping mechanism for you but _goddamn_.”

Keith narrows his eyes when that gets a snicker out of Shiro. Which, in turn, makes Shiro slouch and poke at his chicken. He doesn’t pick up the bit that he slices off, merely nudges it around the plate—but hey, Shiro has it speared on his fork. That’s a step in the right direction. Maybe not going _all _the way to where Shiro ought to be… But at least he’s making the gesture. Taking the baby-step that’s going to lead to someplace better, in just a couple minutes. Or however long it takes.

Putting in that effort ought to count for something, even though almost no one else agrees.

Quirking an eyebrow like he knows exactly what Shiro’s feeling even though _Shiro_ has no earthly idea for himself, Keith huffs. He flips his bangs off his forehead and thankfully, refrains from rolling his eyes. “I don’t know what’s so funny about that. _Believe_ me, Pretty Boy? That’s all _more than enough_ morbid for you. Like, I’d put an embargo on morbidness for you, if I could.”

“Morbidity. And not how embargoes work, I think? But that’s not really… Duly noted, on your real points, I mean…”

His shoulders itch like they’re ready to droop, but Shiro doesn’t let them. He’s already slouching more than enough, making it more obvious that he still has body fat… Making his stomach pooch out, as if all the fat on his torso is bunching up around his belly-button and coating his abs like they don’t want Shiro to remember that he has them. Even if Keith can’t _see_ that, Shiro can _feel_ it underneath his shirt.

Shaking his head as if he can banish the thoughts he’s having, Shiro sighs. “Sorry. I just… That was a really good impression of me. And it was cute—”

“Yeah, I’ve only been perfecting it since we were kids. I’d really like to _hope_ I’ve gotten good at it by now.” Keith’s being deadpan, which probably isn’t good—but his entire face goes soft again as Shiro puts the bit of chicken in his mouth. “And… It’s your right to feel like that? I guess I can’t _stop_ you from thinking that I’m cute—”

_You never have and never will, Baby_, Shiro doesn’t allow himself to say—if only because he’s chewing and he needs to focus so that he won’t rush through this.

Rushing through his dinner would be bad. Very, very bad. Habits like that lack of mindfulness were part of what made Shiro get as big as he did in the first place, and so help him, he _cannot_ let himself go back to that. He needs to stay grounded, needs to keep his mind as clear as possible so he doesn’t lose sight of how he’s feeling, physically. Xanax or no Xanax, he can’t tell which way is up, emotionally, so he needs to keep paying attention to the _physical_ sensations—

“But I still don’t think there’s anything _cute_ about this situation. And I’m _biased_. I admit that. But I’m biased by _worrying_ about you, so…”

Letting his eyes slip closed, Keith tilts his head back. Thinking… It makes sense that he’d need to think. It’d make sense if he needs to feel like it’s too hard to watch Shiro going through these motions. Like he needs a break from being reminded of how _damaged_ Shiro can be about just eating like a _normal_ person.

Still, as Shiro prods at his asparagus—as his fork clinks on the plate again because he falls short of digging it into his vegetables—part of him wishes that Keith would keep watching. Most people make Shiro’s skin crawl when they watch him eat. Even down half his former body weight, he’s too accustomed to the way that people used to stare at him, the way that people used to whisper… Even knowing that his friends never watch him eat because they’re gaping at him like a sideshow freak, it doesn’t _feel_ like they want to help him.

But right now with Keith, Shiro could seriously use that extra set of eyes, that motivation…

Lungs squirming with the realization that clatters into him, Shiro chokes down a sigh. A rush of relief courses over him next, even if it comes up feeling hollow. Keith isn’t watching him, so Keith can’t see the way that Shiro cringes.

“I don’t want to be an asshole, Shiro. Especially not to you. But…” Keith sighs. “You _know_ that we’re not… That it isn’t like… When Hunk or Ryou or anybody gets tense, it’s not that we’re trying to be any… We _know_ that you’re trying, or we want to think—”

“I know what you mean, Baby. I have a long list of prior offenses. Haven’t earned back anybody’s trust about them, yet. Did a huge blow to everything by coming back from California with _abs_ and not a _gut_.” Lest he get too wrapped up in spitting out feelings that Keith doesn’t deserve to be on the receiving end of—in vocalizing things that he’s kept pent up and making Keith deal with them when they shouldn’t be his responsibility—Shiro shuts his eyes. Focuses on taking a few deep, slow, even breaths. “Everyone’s just concerned about me because you don’t want me to hurt myself or anything. I can’t begrudge you that. _Any_ of you.”

_Especially not you_, he thinks as he allows himself to look at Keith again.

Keith nods slowly. The gears spinning in his head are obvious in his pursed lips, his, the way he folds his arms across his chest… “Not all of it is about us trusting you,” he says, locking his eyes on Shiro and straining to keep his gaze on Shiro’s face. “I want you to trust _us_, too.”

Swallowing thickly, Shiro drops his eyes down to his plate. About halfway done, give or take. He should probably not put the food aside, not when Hunk likely measured everything exactly right and _especially_ not when Keith’s making Shiro talk about the issue of whether or not he’s ever had a full-fledged eating disorder… Shiro chokes down another bite of chicken before he sets the plate down by his thigh.

There—perfect compromise between what Keith probably wants and what Shiro definitely needs. He can meditate more easily, if only for a few seconds. But the plate stays close enough that Keith will probably—_hopefully_—guess that Shiro isn’t done yet. That he means to go back to eating his dinner like the alleged adult he is… Just as soon as he’s done sitting as straight as he can without it grating on his nerves, curling his hands around his knees without clinging to them too tightly, taking the deepest, slowest breaths that he can manage, and trying—_hoping_—that he’ll manage to clear his head.

After a few moments, Shiro feels… slightly clearer? Maybe? Not by as much as he’d like, but definitely by enough that he can look Keith in the eye without feeling like he’s so in love, he’s either going to be physically ill or, worse, cough up a bucket’s worth of red azaleas. He’s not sure if the idea he has is the best one for trying to handle any of this, but—

“I’ve… been struggling. In ways I’m really not proud of. And that I don’t want to admit to anybody else—except for maybe Lotor.”

Which Shiro cannot let stand on its own because Keith deserves more than that. He deserves an actual explanation of what that means, if Shiro’s going to drop bombs like that. As his white fringe stubbornly droops back over his face, Shiro sighs. He digs his fingertips into his knees, not hard enough to start hurting but with enough force for him to _feel_ it. Enough grip for it to ground him better.

Making himself look at Keith, he tries again: “I don’t want to talk about the ways I’ve been struggling because they’re definitely… Everyone would probably think… And I’m not saying that anybody would be _wrong_, exactly, in thinking whatever they did? Just that I know it _isn’t_ what they’d think, but still…”

Jesus, so much for explaining things openly and clearly. Shiro wishes that he wouldn’t cringe or roll his eyes at his own garbage antics—but at the moment, he can’t help it. At least Keith doesn’t flinch, or cut in to decide how Shiro’s feeling and then condescend to him about it, the way that practically everybody was doing up at Ryou’s, earlier.

“No matter what I know about the truth here? What’s going on lately… definitely resembles the disordered habits that I’ve…” Shiro tries—and soundly fails—not to let himself sigh all over again. “The stuff that people used to get on me for doing, back when I was fat? And that used to make Ulaz go, ‘Diagnostically speaking, you do not have an eating disorder, but your feelings and behaviors could too easily become one, if allowed to go unchecked, and in light of this, I find myself concerned about how your depression affects your appetite’ and all of that?”

Shiro waits for Keith to nod in understanding. “It’s, like… My appetite’s been getting bad again. And I don’t feel depressed or sick—I haven’t seen _any_ of the other things that happen when I’m in a serious downswing—so I have no idea _why_? And I _hate_ it? I’ve been _trying_ to keep from letting it go too far, but…”

Keith’s eyes go wide, almost desperately—but he’s so soft as he lays a hand over Shiro’s and squeezes. “You’re putting in the effort, Shiro. That’s a big deal, okay? It counts for a lot. Especially to me. I won’t tell anyone unless you say I can—”

“Or unless I make you worried that I’m in danger of hurting myself or someone else—”

“Well, yeah, but you’re putting in the effort, so I don’t feel like you’re exactly—”

“I’m worried about _letting it_ go too far, Keith.”

Saying this kicks Shiro in the chest with a feeling like he’s tattling on somebody he cares about who explicitly asked him not to. His lungs start twitching as if they have several complaints to register about Shiro using their oxygen to admit these things—and worse, he can’t tell if that’s coming from what he said or from how he feels after saying it. That guilty feeling _cannot_ be good—too much accumulated experience with his self-destructive habits tells Shiro that it _isn’t_—which makes it all the more essential for Shiro to admit these things… Yet, something in his chest burns with the feeling that confessing would be _absolutely terrible_—

Until he looks Keith in the eye again. For all the skin on the back of his neck is squirming, Shiro gets a flood of warmth washing through his chest from looking at Keith. His perfect, blue-violet eyes glimmer in the dim lights of Shiro’s bedroom, seeming like they could tear up at any moment—but they don’t. Instead, they focus on Shiro, and along with Keith’s fingers squeezing on his palm, that gleam behind his eyes feels as if Keith is telling him, _It’s okay. You can do this. I believe in you and nothing’s gonna change that._

“I’ve been putting in the effort to eat enough. Trying to, anyway? And Lotor’s seen me in the act of having no appetite, so he’s watching out. Which at least he _tells me_ about, which is more than I can say for _Lance_ and _Sven _and **_Hunk_**, who is _still_ mad at me and I _still_ have no idea why…”

_Aside from how I have abs, now—but it’s been almost six weeks. Isn’t that enough time for him to be over that?_

Shiro doesn’t let himself sigh. He curls his hand around Keith’s instead. “It’s starting to feel good again. Not eating, I mean. And I don’t _want_ to be afraid of any … I _worked on this_ in California, no matter what anybody else thinks, and I _know_ better, but I’m…”

Keith’s wrist and fingers tremble—but he keeps his eyes on Shiro. “It’s gonna be okay, Shiro. We just have to work together—”

“_Is_ it, though?” The question tumbles out of Shiro’s mouth before he recognizes it burning on his tongue.

Keith furrows his brow. How could he possibly not understand the question?

“I’m serious, Keith. I thought that everything would be _great_ when I got home, but…” Looking him in the eye would probably help. At the very least, Keith might take _some_ kind of comfort in that. But eye-contact makes Shiro’s skin crawl until he ducks his chin. “I worked _so hard_ to do everything right. I did every workbook exercise that Dr. Hall sent home with me. I _felt_ better, and then it didn’t even _take_ that much to set me back. Hunk being mad at me, a few bad jokes that shouldn’t bother me, Lance and Pidge and their _‘hashtag Not My Shiro’ _stuff—”

Shiro cuts himself off, catching the plate as it hits his thigh. He barely keeps the food from spilling on his sheets.

Keith freezes in the middle of leaning forward, eyes wider than usual and lips puckered like he’s sucked on a particularly vicious lemon. It makes Shiro want to kiss him instead of talking, the way Keith looks like a kid who got caught sneaking cookies before dinner. Then again, pretty much everything Keith does makes Shiro want to kiss him. Moreover, Keith probably wouldn’t appreciate the offer when they’re supposed to be having a serious talk. Whatever he’s feeling, his cheeks flush pink as Shiro looks down to the hand he’s resting his weight on.

Which makes no sense—the blushing, that is? Shiro blinks at Keith’s hand, trying to find anything worth getting embarrassed over—

“_Shit_. Sorry, I’m _so_ sorry,” Keith croaks. “I totally forgot, I wasn’t thinking about your dinner, I just wanted to—”

That clicks the answer into place: Keith’s pushed the mattress down so far, it knocked Shiro’s plate around. He’s embarrassed because he didn’t think about that before trying to get closer to Shiro. He probably didn’t think about how much heavier he is than what he’s used to. The way he tries to force a smile, as if begging Shiro not to be upset with him, probably proves that theory.

Sighing softly that Keith’s fine, Shiro hands the plate over so it can get to his bedside table. With that obstruction temporarily removed, Shiro’s ready to follow where Keith leads. Which, as it turns out, means reclining on the headboard and unfolding his legs.

Keith’s quick about climbing into Shiro’s lap. His weight is warm and welcome—heavy, yes, but anymore, Shiro can deadlift more than Keith without it hurting _that_ much—and Keith nods his permission for Shiro to splay his hands out on his thighs. But once he’s settled, he scrunches up his nose and lets slip a soft, frustrated groaning noise. It’s like he didn’t plan this far ahead and doesn’t have a plan, a road-map, or an app on his phone that could help him in any meaningful way. Knowing Keith, that would make perfect sense, even if Shiro wishes that he could make it easier for Keith to sort through his feelings, his ideas, and what he wants for both of them.

Unfortunately, Shiro’s not sure how to do that, aside from waiting and following Keith’s lead.

He leans into the contact, following Shiro’s hand when he brushes his bangs aside. He nudges Shiro into cupping his cheek, then lays one hand over the back to keep Shiro from letting go. It’s all very sweet, and Shiro can’t ignore the significance of Keith letting himself seek comfort like this, of letting himself relax into Shiro’s touch—but there’s something limp and hollow about the way he smirks.

“Hey. I’m supposed to be comforting _you_ right now, dummy.” Still, Keith smiles genuinely. A bit tightly, and with an edge of sadness to it. But it’s soft, and open, and it makes Shiro’s heart leap into his throat. “You’re the one who’s actually upset—”

“Yeah. Because me admitting what I did _isn’t_ something that could _possibly_ upset you.”

Huffing, Keith bats at Shiro’s bicep. “Okay, I don’t like hearing that. But I’m not the one who feels like he’s backsliding.” Careful not to do any harm, he edges closer to Shiro. He teases his belly against Shiro’s abs, only to make Shiro’s breath hitch by nudging their foreheads together. “I don’t know what’s happening either, Shiro. But whatever it is, I wanna help you. No matter what it takes, I _know_ we can work this out.”

Keith pulls back enough to let Shiro see his face. “Let me help you. Please?”

Shiro doesn’t need to think before agreeing. He only hesitates while moving his hands up to Keith’s hips, waiting for Keith’s sign that that’s okay. Slinging his arms around Keith’s waist, Shiro inhales deeply, tries to keep his thoughts away from how thick Keith’s getting, the increased warmth of his body, the softness of his flesh, how nice his chest and belly feel as he leans on Shiro, rubbing up on him so easily, so _comfortably_—

“Is it weird that I wish it _were_ a depression thing?” Shiro spits it out fine, but shuts his eyes when Keith pushes aside his white bangs and touches his face. “I just… If it were that, I’d _know_ what’s going on. I wouldn’t _like_ it, but I’d know what to do. I wouldn’t feel so _confused_, and _lost_, and…”

“Helpless?” Keith offers, saying the word that Shiro didn’t want to. Gently, he leans back up into Shiro’s forehead. “I’m sorry, Shiro. I know you’re hurting. And I wish that I knew exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it for you.”

He inhales sharply. He pushes his stomach even closer to Shiro’s. Then, holding Shiro’s hair out of the way, Keith leans up to kiss his forehead.

“But for what it’s worth? You _aren’t_ helpless. And I’ll fight anyone who tries to say you are.” Wearing the half-hearted ghost of a smirk, eyes gleaming too fondly to seem playful or cool about anything, Keith pecks at the tip of Shiro’s nose. “I’ll fight you about it, if I have to. But only if you force my hand, because I’d really, _really_ rather not.”

“I’d rather not put you in that position, either. Not just about the disordered or not question, or the backsliding question, either.” It takes some stretching and a twinge of pain, but Shiro angles his head around enough to kiss Keith’s wrist. Which doesn’t mean anything beyond the fact that Keith feels safe, because it _can’t_ mean anything. A kiss is just a kiss, and anyway, Keith kissed him first. Shiro sighs, “I don’t want to make you fight me about anything.”

“Okay, good. If you’re ready to start with that…” Keith tucks both clumps of Shiro’s bangs behind his ears. “Are you okay? Not in general, I mean, you’re clearly not doing so great in _general_, but like…” Somehow, Keith keeps his expression flat as he rests more of his weight on Shiro’s lap. “With what we did tonight? You seemed into it, but once it was over?”

Shiro frowns bemusedly, and it only deepens when Keith looks like he doesn’t understand. Gently squeezing one of his love-handles doesn’t make him drop that expression either, doesn’t help him out in the way that Shiro wishes it would. All Keith does is shake his head and make a throaty little noise that emphasizes how he doesn’t get what Shiro thinks he’s on about. Upon reflection, Shiro has to wonder why he thought that groping Keith would explain anything—but that conclusion helps him figure out what to do about as much as his groping is helping Keith.

He knows that he owes Keith more than dead silence and staring that everybody else would probably call besotted. He knows that he needs to do _something_ because Keith’s looking at him so expectantly, and he asked that question so seriously. Giving him the wrong answer could ruin everything, but Shiro has got to put something together before he lets Keith go too long without any kind of sign from Shiro. Before he lets Keith get it in his head that Shiro doesn’t care about him, doesn’t value him, doesn’t think that he deserves an answer or a response from someone who he cares about—

It takes a few false starts for him to splutter, “Shouldn’t I be asking _you_ about that, though?”

“Why would you? I’m not the one who looks like he was crying in the shower.” Keith scrunches up his nose. “_Were_ you doing that?”

“Kinda wish I had. Might’ve been easier than… Y’know, whatever I thought I was doing.”

Which _sucks_ as an explanation or anything else—but there really isn’t a _good_ way of telling the best friend you’ve always been in love with that you were jerking off in the shower, and that you couldn’t even focus on thoughts of _him_ because of how sick you felt with everything you choose to be. There’s not good way of admitting that you _couldn’t_ cum until you told yourself how disgusting you are.

Shiro has even fewer ideas in the face of Keith pouting like this is one of the worse dialogue options that Shiro could’ve picked.

“Are you okay, though?” Keith says again, pulling back and once more letting Shiro take in a full-view of his face. “It got pretty intense in there tonight, yeah? And then you took a while in the shower… And then your appetite’s shot and you needed your Xanax… And the person on the receiving end of humiliation isn’t the only person in a scene…”

Keith sighs so heavily that it must be a miracle, how long he’s held off. “D’you see where I’m going with this?”

“Aftercare isn’t exclusively for you? And you want to know if I need any?” Shiro waits for Keith to nod in confirmation—but unfortunately, that doesn’t help him find an answer.

Keith’s hand combing through his hair, though… That helps him _breathe _more easily… And it helps him take the glass of water when Keith hands it to him… Keith shushes quietly and tells him to get it down more slowly, to keep breathing instead of chugging it… None of this is really making Shiro feel like he has the first clue about what’s going on with his emotions, or what he can tell Keith about handling them, or why his head feels like such a mess… It’s like when he, and Keith, and Hunk fall behind on keeping the apartment tidy, except it’s pent up inside of Shiro’s skull…

“Based on how long you’re taking, Kashi? I’m guessing that you _do_ need aftercare.” Keith doesn’t back down from that when Shiro groans at him. If anything, the face he pulls is fifteen times more serious. “You can’t even tell me if you need aftercare or not. Which means that you’re a mess. Which means that you need this and aren’t letting yourself ask for it. Because you _do that_ when you’re feeling like a total mess—pulling back from the help you need or don’t, I mean.”

His eyebrow quirks, but drops before Shiro can read too much into it. “Am I wrong?”

“_No_…” Shiro’s head jostles his hanging lanterns as he droops against the headboard. Not enough to upset them too terribly, at least. Closing his eyes so he can try to focus, he sighs. “So, how do we want to do this? Aside from pre-negotiating about it next time. Assuming that there’s gonna—”

“Unless _you _want to call things off? There’s going to be a next time, Shiro. I liked what we did tonight. I have fun with you like this. And yes, we’ll be negotiating beforehand, next time. We should’ve done that today, but I thought…”

Keith doesn’t mention the fact that getting commissions from one of his clients will keep Shiro in this, if they ask for Sable to be involved. But when he squeezes Shiro’s shoulder, it doesn’t seem to matter. All that matters is Keith sitting in his lap, and his hands on Keith’s perfect body, and trying to figure out what’s going on with _this_—whatever all _this_ thinks it is when it’s at home—and then working through _this _with Keith for both their sakes. Which is gonna require vulnerability, if any of Shiro’s previous experiences with aftercare hold true right now.

Which is gonna require… something that Shiro can’t put his finger on, not even when he allows himself to look at Keith.

“As for right now…” Keith rests his hand on Shiro’s cheek and nuzzles at his forehead. “We’re gonna do whatever you think you need… As soon as you can tell, at least…” He sighs softly. “That’s not—I’m not sighing about you, okay? You’re fine, Shiro. Fine, and so, so good. And if you don’t believe that right now, then I’ll believe enough for both of us. More sighing at _myself _than anything—”

“You didn’t do anything _wrong_, though, Baby—”

“I proposed a scene idea. I knew that it involved play that could get tangled up and emotionally messy. That’s not my first time with humiliation, so I _know_ how it can go. But then, I didn’t bother discussing how aftercare might go or if you’d even _need_ any—”

“In fairness, I probably wouldn’t have told you that I might. Probably wouldn’t have thought that I—”

“That’s not exactly _reassuring_, Shiro.” As soon as he says that, Keith cringes. “Sorry. I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve that. And being worried about you isn’t an excuse. Especially not when you’re already feeling like a mess.”

For all Shiro wants to simply give Keith his forgiveness—for all Keith could do almost anything and get Shiro to tell him that everything’s alright and he’s done absolutely nothing wrong by Shiro—something that flares up in Shiro’s chest gives him a feeling like Keith wouldn’t appreciate the speed, right now. He has to at least give off the appearance of thinking about this, even though he doesn’t need to. There’s nothing to be gained in making Keith feel like Shiro isn’t taking this seriously.

Telling Keith, _“It’s fine, Baby, you didn’t make me feel bad” _gets him to sigh in relief. He lets his shoulders relax and wiggles on Shiro’s thighs, not trying to key him up so much as getting himself more comfortable. From the warmth behind his eyes to the small, fond smile curling up his mouth, his face softens up in the way that he so often saves for Shiro exclusively.

“Okay, so…” Keith purses his lips with a pensive hum. “Are… Can you tell me how you feel, yet?”

“I mean, ‘feeling like a mess’ sums it up pretty well, honestly. You‘ve got a real way with words, y‘know?” But Shiro wilts when Keith doesn‘t find this funny. “Fair enough. I guess I‘m feeling, like… I‘m feeling _bad_.”

Keith nods. Brushes his thumb over Shiro’s cheekbone. “That’s a good start. Now, I want you to breathe. And _think_. And get more specific.”

This is one of the worst feelings in the world: knowing what he feels and even having words to put on everything—but not wanting to say anything, lest Keith decide that Shiro’s feelings are in the right. Guilt digs a set of long, jagged, icicle claws into the pit of Shiro’s chest, jerking on him as if they mean to pull his lungs straight out of him. The point of aftercare is letting Keith know what’s wrong so he can help. Shiro has to be open with him, needs to let himself be vulnerable because if he doesn’t, then he won’t feel any better. He’ll just stew in misery until he probably makes himself get sick and dies.

Worse, it could be taken as a sign that he doesn’t trust Keith.

But there’s still an anxious knot writhing in Shiro’s stomach as he meets Keith’s eyes. As he takes another deep breath—as he takes in the way Keith’s staring at him and the concern etched into every bit of Keith’s face—all that Shiro can think is, _Please, don’t hate me for this, Baby. Please, Jesus, I know I have no right to be asking for anything right now? But please don’t let Keith see me the way I see myself. I have no idea what I’d do—_

Shiro sighs so hard that it must come up from his bone marrow. Nods more for his own benefit than to communicate anything to Keith.

“I’m feeling like I’m the _worst_, okay?” Shiro doesn’t want to sound too harsh—but the exhaustion in his voice might be even worse. He sounds like he’s got an anchor chained up to his voice, dragging it down into the Marianas Trench, and he doesn’t have the wherewithal to struggle. “I’m feeling like a complete heel. Like I’m cruel, and messed up, and there’s got to be something _wrong_ with me. And I don’t even know if I _want_ to know what it is.”

Shifting against Shiro without any intention behind it, Keith considers what’s been said. “That’s good, Shiro. You’re doing _so_ good.” A nudging of foreheads against each other, and a warm sigh, as if there’s nowhere else that Keith would rather be. “Do you know _why_ you feel like that? It’s okay if you don’t. We can figure it out together.”

“Isn’t it _obvious_, I mean… Wait, no, sorry, I’m so…” Shiro wishes he could keep looking at Keith while he admits this. Except meeting Keith’s eyes is making the tight knot buried in his stomach twist around even harder, dragging itself out into his veins and muscles, latching onto his insides like burrs on someone’s jeans. “All of the things I _said_ to you, though? I know that it was _supposed_ to be a humiliation scene, and I _remember_ when you came, but…”

He forces himself to look Keith in the eye because Keith deserves that from him. “Isn’t there a point where things go too far?”

“Yes. There can be. And if you’d gone there—or gotten anywhere _near_ that point, even—then I could’ve used my safe-words. I could’ve called yellow so we could talk, or red for a full stop. And I promise you, Shiro: if you’d started going too far, I _would_ have safe-worded out.”

Keith’s firm tone might be undercut somewhat by the soft look in his eyes. Or maybe they enhance each other. It’s hard to tell—but whatever the truth is, he’s so painfully earnest when he says, “I know what I like in bed. I know what I like from humiliation scenes. I proposed tonight’s clip in the first place because your fat-talk kept edging toward humiliation, and I know you’re into that—or anyway, you did it with Lotor and Maurice—so, I thought it might be fun.”

“Most of it was? I liked being with you. And the way you talked back. I_ loved_—” Shiro cuts off the thought he’s having about the way Keith’s belly jiggled as he finally burst his jeans. Admitting to his bad feelings. Making Keith clean up after his shameful kinks is entirely another. “I had a good time for most of it, I mean.”

Keith purses his lips and narrows his eyes in the way he always does when he can tell that something’s likely up with Shiro. “So, what did you say that made you feel bad? Because, from where I was? You did _so_ well. I loved everything that you said.”

Shiro scoffs before he can think any better of it. “You _liked_ me calling you a bloated, shameless tub of lard who has no self-control and can’t fit in his favorite jeans? Or me going on about how _big_ you’re getting like it’s a _bad_ thing? Ripping into you like your thighs are anything but _beautiful_, which they absolutely _are_?” Dimly, somewhere in the back of his mind, Shiro _knows_ that he’s being ridiculous. Keith came over Shiro rubbing it in his face that he used to be so thin before he started letting himself go. If he didn’t like what Shiro said, then why would he—

Trying to keep himself rooted in the here-and-now, Shiro shakes his head. “I just don’t get it, I guess? I _know_, logically, that you asked for the humiliation. And I believe that you wouldn’t ask for that if you didn’t get something out of it, but?” Slumping even more against the headboard, he lets himself shrug. “And I _know_ that you understand safe-words, after insisting on them like you do? But still, thinking about what I said? How I manhandled you while saying everything? It all feels like I’m…”

He must trail off for too long without meaning to—or that’s what Shiro gets out of the light and whisper-gentle way Keith pats his cheek. “You can do this, Shiro,” he says, brushing the backs of his fingers down Shiro’s jaw. “You’re doing such a good job of talking about this. I know that it’s hard. But you’re doing well, and I _know_ you can get through this.”

Shiro nods, trying to absorb some of Keith’s belief in him, since he’s rather short on belief in himself right now.

Leaning his face into Keith’s palm, he sighs. “I’m hitting a snag here? Because what I said feels like I’m hurting you. Not like impact play, either. _That_ makes perfect sense to me. Which is probably _crazy_, or at least _somebody_ out there has got to think so, but…”

Stomach twisting, Shiro makes himself look Keith in the eye. He needs that shot in the arm, the way he feels so much more capable because Keith is looking at him as if he matters. More than that, Keith’s eyes gleam like Shiro is actually as strong, and resilient, and loving, and brave, and _good_ as Keith has always thought he is. His fidgety, twitching hind-brain hisses that there must be something else to Keith’s expression, that he’s going too soft for Shiro to only be someone who matters to him, that the determination burning behind Keith’s eyes sure looks an awful lot like Keith would literally die for Shiro, though he’d probably prefer to _live_ with Shiro instead… The selfish, belly-to-the-ground, irreparably horrid part of Shiro’s mind insists that the look on Keith’s face seems an awful lot like _love_—

—But that thought is both ridiculous and, at the moment, massively unhelpful.

“Even with everything I know, I _don’t. understand_.” Something sick and guilty twists in the back of his head as he says this. It doesn’t get easier when he ducks his chin, either. Feeling his skin crawling Keith’s scrutiny—trying not to get too wrapped up in the sense that Keith can see through him, all the way down to his soul—Shiro sighs. “I called you a pig, and a whale, and a hippopotamic land-mass in the making. I’m trying to get it on your level, I promise, but…”

The ensuing silence grates on Shiro’s nerves until he can practically feel them fraying. When he manages to look Keith in the eye again, he’s met with a dull, flat, tight expression. The only gleam of anything seems like Keith could be convinced to smack Shiro, if the circumstances were ever-so-slightly different. If not for this being an attempt at aftercare, Keith probably would thwack Shiro, at least for the sake of impact. If nothing else, Keith would want to make a point—and the major deterrent, at the moment, is the fact that he wouldn’t succeed.

“_Seriously_, Shiro?” he deadpans as if this is supposed to explain anything when it doesn’t. “You got keyed-up like that… but you have no idea what could possibly be hot about teasing me over getting fat?” A shake of the head makes Keith sigh. “Alright. _Why_ do you think that consensual teasing is incompatible with something being hot.”

Which Shiro would roll his eyes about, except for how Keith might give up and slap him for it.

“I get the appeal of humiliation just fine. But at the same time? I’ve had to hear all of that stuff from other people before. People who _didn’t_ have my permission to say it.”

Even though Shiro hasn’t said anything like this aloud in ages—not since the incident where he was sleep-deprived in a session and Ulaz caught him in a not-quite-lie about his sexual proclivities—the words roll off his tongue with practiced precision. Despite the guilt writhing in the pit of his stomach, Shiro manages to keep his breathing even, meditative, as close to calm as he can get, under the circumstances. His heartbeat’s still ratcheting up to something, still filling Shiro with the sense that he’s being dragged up the biggest hill on a roller coaster into Hell—

“I _know_ that you consented. I _know_ that we agreed to this. But I’m really getting stuck on how _cruel_ that all felt—”

“Are you, though?” Keith’s eyes narrow, flash like he’s fighting himself so that he doesn’t end up screaming at Shiro. “Are you _really_ stuck on that? Or is there anything else going on? You _know_ that I won’t judge”

Shiro swallows thickly. He trembles underneath of Keith. Doesn’t know what to do, but before he can remember what self-control feels like—“I don’t really even—that’s not what I—I mean? I’m not trying to say that _you’re_ wrong or anything for what you like to do in bed or—”

“I didn’t think you were saying that. Or feel insulted. But I’m still curious about—”

“It’s _weird_, Keith! It’s _weird_, and it’s _crazy_, and I’m not _supposed_ to like this—”

The words burst out of Shiro with so much force, Keith has to pull back before he realizes what he’s babbling about. Blinking at Keith’s scrunched up, trembling look of sadness, Shiro can’t feel where his lungs have gotten off to. He must be fine because he’s breathing enough to keep from passing out—but at the same time, it doesn’t feel like that counts for much? There’s still a heavy, choking wall of dread building up throughout his room. When Keith squeezes his chubby thighs on Shiro’s lap, it feels like there’s no way that he’ll ever catch his breath again.

Shiro shakes his head and sighs. Draws in a deep breath just so he won’t forget that he can do it. “I mean, I’m not… Not supposed to _be like _this—”

“No, no, that _isn’t_ what you said, Shiro—”

“Well, it’s what I _meant—_”

“I don’t know if I believe that, actually—”

“I don’t—it’s the _truth_, Keith. It’s not like I’m… Just? Honestly, why _wouldn’t _you believe it?”

Keith shrugs, but there’s nothing casual about it. “Tell me what you meant to say and maybe I will.”

He’s giving Shiro a look so pointed, he probably needs a weapon permit. Worse, as he drops his hands to Shiro’s shoulder, there’s an unmistakable feeling radiating off of Keith. It screams at Shiro that there is very much a right answer to this prompt, and if he provides Keith with one of the wrong ones, then the results will be unfortunate for both of them.

Closing his eyes to think still doesn’t make his head feel any less muddled. If Shiro could pry himself off the bed and get past both Hunk and Keith, going for an extra 10k run probably wouldn’t clear his thoughts up for him, either. He might as well have swamp-fog covering his brain, filling up his skull and mugging down every synapse until Shiro would swear he’s never going to think again. Worse, this feeling like his brain is drowning on dry land doesn’t have any answers hidden in it, and yet, he owes Keith _something_—

“I meant _exactly _how it sounded,” he confesses, turning his gaze back to Keith. “I just wish to God I didn’t.”

Even given Keith’s affirmation that this is progress in the right direction—even given his nod, and the way he squeezes Shiro’s shoulder, and his permission to take that thought and go with it—Shiro isn’t sure what he can say.

He _knows_ that there are words for this and that he needs to use them. But there’s still a feeling like he’s trying to puzzle through Altean or Galran when all he knows is a handful of phrases that, overwhelmingly, he pronounces wrong and can’t connect to a more practical meaning. It feels like all of the ways his brain reminds him that he grew up speaking English and Japanese at home and some days, he can barely communicate with either.

Keith kissing his forehead again floods Shiro’s chest with warmth that makes him feel like he can do this—and yet, this fog won’t shake out of his skull. There’s gotta be something wrong with him, if he’s like this over a confession that he _knows_ he needs to make or else Keith might decide that Shiro isn’t taking this aftercare seriously, and then decide that Shiro’s broken after all, and then he might never trust Shiro again. Keith might call off their arrangement with the clip-shoots and forcibly retire Sable, no matter how much Shiro wants to keep doing this with him. He might decide to do what everybody else has done and start dictating what Shiro most wants and needs in his life.

Or worse, Keith might stop looking at him with any kind of warmth.

“Say that I _am_ into something like this,” Shiro’s mouth decides to whisper for him. “That _maybe_ I have been for a while. Like, for so long that I don’t know _exactly_ when it started, but…” He chokes down a groan but can’t stop himself from cringing. “You know Bruce Bogtrotter from _Matilda_? Remember the movie? And the scene with the enormous chocolate cake…?”

Waiting for Keith’s response, Shiro’s lungs hold his breath for him. The sigh explodes out as soon as Keith nods. His cheeks flush hot over this—and Shiro’s gotta be going scarlet over the way that Keith furrows his brow—but the confirmation that they’re on the same page (or close enough to it) gives Shiro enough of a kick in the backside to maintain forward momentum.

Thankfully, Keith doesn’t try rubbing his belly on Shiro. As much as Shiro would love that, he can’t afford that level of distraction.

“Yeah, well. I remember gawking at that scene and getting teased about how I was already starting to get chubby.” Shiro quirks his shoulders as if he can make himself stop feeling like admitting this means anything. Maybe it _could_, but it doesn’t _need_ to—and Shiro can’t allow himself to limn any unnecessary significance to anything he’s saying. “Before I met you? Before we even lost my Mom and Dad, I… My Dad caught me staring at that scene. He thought that it was funny when I got embarrassed, and when Ryou told him that I’d been rewinding it for about an hour when Ryou wanted to watch _Power Rangers_.”

Nothing’s making this feel any easier. Nothing’s bringing Shiro closer to the casual feeling that he wants—but he shakes his head as if this will quell the pang in his chest of _something that he can’t identify_. “When I stood up… I guess my shirt was getting a bit tight on me? Because it was riding up and I didn’t notice, not until my Dad…? And then with what he _said_ to me? He didn’t _mean_ anything by it—at least, he didn’t mean anything that I could take the wrong way? I _know_ he didn’t, he was always _fine_ about Ryou’s weight and that’s when he was still bigger than me, but—”

“It’s okay, Shiro.” Brushing Shiro’s white fringe back behind his ear, Keith whispers, “You’re doing a good job. You can keep going. You’ve got this. I’m here, I’m listening, I’m not judging. Even if it’s hard, you can do this—”

“He as good as _told_ me that I shouldn’t get too excited about a chocolate cake ’cause I was already getting _fat_.”

Keith gasps and his eyes go wide. “He did _what_?”

It isn’t a hard question. Still, Shiro recoils like he’s been slapped.

A sick, hot rush shocks through him. Like someone’s slammed a bolt of lightning into him. Chin jerking down and eyes clenching shut, he can’t get one of his slow breaths. Only a sharp inhale, and that makes the heat spill down his face onto his neck. Trying to think about an answer, he reels like he’s going to throw up. Jesus Christ, what kind of _idiot_ is he? Getting upset over this? His cheeks were almost calming down back to a shade that looks more human than tomato. He hadn’t started feeling his blush prickling the skin at the tips of his ears.

And now? There’s something behind his Adam’s apple, he can _feel _it—but swallowing thickly doesn’t dislodge it. Whatever it is stubbornly stays in place. It’s not choking him, he guesses, since he’s shaking—but he’s not lightheaded. His hands flop like dying fish against Keith’s thighs, and his teeth chatter like he’s been stuck outside in a blizzard, and he curls up his left leg, trying to keep it from bouncing underneath of Keith and making him uncomfortable—but he _doesn’t _feel like he’s going to pass out. It _might _be a good sign. But Keith cupping his cheek again is the only thing that keeps Shiro from smacking his skull against the headboard, which feels like a bad thing.

At best, Shiro’s explicitly self-harming impulses are coming back and he’ll need to tell Ulaz as soon as possible in their next session. Not that he can do anything about this, at the moment. All Shiro can do right now, if he wants to help himself and Keith? Is keep breathing, try to focus, and get through this conversation if he can.

“That might not be the best version of what he—”

“Shiro, if your Dad said something like that, you don’t need to make excuses for—”

“I’m not _trying_ to. He didn’t _mean_ anything rude. He was teasing, sure, but being _fun_ about it—”

“Except for how it clearly _wasn’t_ fun for you—”

“But it wasn’t—I made it sound like a big deal when it really _wasn’t_—”

“If you didn’t like it? If it hurt you even a little bit? You don’t need to pretend—”

“I’m not _pretending_ anything! I’m trying to tell you _exactly_ what he said.”

This makes Keith stop mid-syllable. Whether he _means _to pout or not—whether he means to sulk like an upset kitten—Keith’s doing that and he’s almost adorable enough to take the edge off. Not enough to make Shiro feel any less like he’s committing a betrayal by admitting to these things. Not enough to make him lose the sense of dread looming over him like he’s breaking an important confidence and sooner or later, everyone he loves will hate him for it.

But God, Keith’s cute, and so help Shiro, that counts for _something_.

“How do you remember exactly what he said?” Sighing heavily, Keith droops into a slouch. “Shiro, I… Not for nothing, but you take forever to learn anybody’s name and I’ve watched you lose your phone in the refrigerator. How can you still remember something your Dad said when you were, what? Six?”

“Seven, probably. It was before we lost Mom and Dad, but not _that_ long before. One of the last clear memories that I have of him, but—” But Keith’s giving him a tight, crumpled up look that refuses to let Shiro think these details are even remotely near the point. “—But the thing is, like? It was a moment that shouldn’t have mattered, except it did. Dad and Ryou thought that it was all in good fun, and okay, Dad was skinny when he was younger? My grandparents and Aunt Satomi and Great-Uncle Kiyoshi were all thin? But I never knew my Dad without a belly, so he probably didn’t _feel_ like he was kicking down or whatever—”

“Shiro,” Keith says, firmly but not loudly. When Shiro flinches again, Keith nuzzles at his forehead. “What did he say?”

Swallowing thickly doesn’t help Shiro feel any stronger or more capable. Neither does the warm glimmer of _belief_ behind Keith’s eyes. All of this feels like a mistake, like Shiro needs to take back everything and pretend that he was joking, even if that makes Keith hate him.

But with his eyes closed, he manages to summon the words: “He tugged my shirt down for me. He patted my stomach. And he told me, _‘You better watch out for eating like that, Kashi. You’re already looking pretty chubby. Can’t let yourself have too much chocolate cake or you’ll be fatter than me before you’re ten.’_”

Shiro’s breath comes in with a shiver, comes out as a sigh. “And then he and Ryou laughed like it was the most hilarious thing they’d ever heard. Kids at school were already coming at me over being on the heavy side, and when Dad said that…” His head shakes itself without waiting for permission. “Ryou tried to excuse everything later, tried to say they hadn’t meant anything like it sounded. And he was right that I hadn’t told Dad what I’d been hearing from my classmates?”

“But it still hurt you.” When Shiro nods, Keith nestles into his chest, puts his head on Shiro’s shoulder. “You’re allowed to be upset about that Shiro. You were sensitive about it and what he said stung. But…” Keith huffs, wiggling against Shiro as he tries to get more comfortable. “What does that have to do with… Y’know, the other stuff?”

Curling his arms back around Keith’s waist, Shiro gives up a noncommittal noise. “I wasn’t watching that scene because I wanted to eat the cake. I couldn’t believe that Bruce Bogtrotter could _eat_ like that. It was like I couldn’t look away. Or in cartoons when they’d have some character get fat for an episode…” He lets his cheek drop onto Keith’s soft hair. “But I was already wrong enough for being a little chubby. So, wanting that for anyone else was about ten times worse. Making other people wrong like I was… Then, trying to lose any of the weight only made me fatter, things got worse at school, Melissa and her clique wanted to _break_ me—”

“But they didn’t break you. No matter what they tried, you were stronger than them—”

“But I’m still disgusting.” Feeling Keith tense in his arms—hearing Keith’s breath hitch, feeling the lack of it against his neck—Shiro hugs him closer. “Sorry, Baby. I didn’t mean to upset you. But that’s how the way feels. Knowing how much it hurts to be the big guy… How people stare, and how it feels when you can’t fit in your clothes… I mean, how many times have I been an ugly-crying mess about that happening to me?”

Curling a hand in Shiro’s t-shirt, Keith whines so softly that Shiro nearly misses it. He burrows into Shiro as if there’s any closer to Shiro that he can get—and hey, who knows? Maybe Keith can find a way to transcend the limitations of their physical beings. If anybody ever could…

“So, I’m like… How can I know what struggling into tight pants feels like, but salivate while someone else is doing it?”

Shiro swallows thickly as Keith’s lips nudge at his neck. Probably an accident. Keith didn’t mean anything. No need to draw attention to it and embarrass Keith. After everything he’s done for Shiro, he doesn’t deserve that.

“How can I hate having any extra weight or chubby parts on _my_ body, then completely lose my head because some guy’s gained a little starter belly? How can I _know_ what it’s like to pop a button off your jeans, but sit here, watching you cram yourself into your old jeans, holding my breath and _waiting_ for your button to burst?”

Keith’s head comes off of Shiro’s shoulder, but he doesn’t move to look at Shiro’s face. Not yet, anyway. Not that Shiro would blame Keith if he _didn’t_ want to look him in the eye, whether now or ever again. There’s a limit to everything, including how much of Shiro’s nonsense Keith can take.

“As for what I said in the scene tonight, though?” Sighing, Shiro stares over Keith’s shoulder at his messy desk. None of the clutter has a convincing argument for why he ought to stop. If he’s burning up the last bit of Keith’s patience for him, then Shiro might as well go all-in on honestly. “I _know_ how much those insults hurt. I _still _throw them at myself when I’m stressed out. And you remember how I got after that winter formal, senior year?—”

Mid-breath, Shiro’s cut off by a pair of lips colliding with his own.

Reflexively, he sighs into the kiss. Tilts his head to give Keith a better angle. Leans back so Keith can pin him to the headboard. His mouth is warm, and damp, and amidst all the mixed-up tastes and textures along Keith’s teeth and tongue, Shiro picks out hints of teriyaki sauce and garlic. Stomach churning as if it actually minds feeling hungry—like Shiro’s garbage brain finally decided to remember that that hunger feels bad—Shiro writhes against Keith’s belly. As he slips a hand into Keith’s hair, snaking it around behind Keith’s head, Shiro feels like he’s being enveloped in Keith’s chub. No, Keith isn’t big enough to do that yet, but with the way his middle squishes up on Shiro’s abs? Keith gaining that much weight might literally be Heaven.

For now, though, Keith’s mouth is all the Heaven that Shiro needs. Not least since it’s the Heaven that he has right now, with Keith sucking on his tongue, and nipping at his lip, and rocking his hips down onto Shiro—_Jesus_, there’s no way that he can get hard again right now. But with Keith’s thick thighs embracing his hip and Keith’s plush ass rubbing on his crotch? Shiro wishes that he could. Keith’s kisses are coming hungrier and faster, going at Shiro’s mouth like Keith means to steal the air from out of Shiro’s lungs.

Breathless, Shiro feels so much tension ebbing out of him, his bones might well be rubber bands. Yet, even when Keith pulls back to breathe, Shiro’s certain that his lungs can wait. He chases after Keith’s mouth, throttling a whine. It escapes his throat anyway when his lips hit two of Keith’s fingers. What in the world…? Oh God, what did Shiro mess up _this_ time?

Pouting at Keith doesn’t give Shiro any answers. It earns him a chuckle and a playful smirk, though, which makes his heart erupt, floods his chest with feeling of _wanting_ and _warm_ and, in defiance of all common sense, something that Shiro can only name as _pink_. As soon as Keith has his breath back in his grasp, he swoops in without missing a beat. He picks up kissing Shiro again as if he never stopped, as if nothing in the universe could ever matter more than this.

Their next break is for the sake Shiro’s lungs, but he still whines when they separate. He tightens his arms around Keith’s waist like he could lose Keith forever if he doesn’t hold onto him for dear life. His heartbeat races. His body burns like it’s on fire. His brain clears out the fog but in its place, all Shiro has are _want_ and _need_ and _please, Keith, please_ and something pricking up in the back of his throat, teasing like he might cough—

“God, I love you so much,” he sighs into Keith’s mouth. He steals a briefer kiss, only sucking on Keith’s lip while he brushes those messy bangs off of his forehead. “Keith, _please_… I love you…”

Snaking his stomach along Shiro’s abs, Keith nudges their foreheads together. “I know.”

Shiro’s ready to tell Keith how he feels all over again—but his brain skids to a halt instead. When Keith plants another kiss on him, taking his mouth as if laying claim to it, Shiro can’t make himself react. His lips won’t move. His throat won’t let out a moans, or a sigh, or any signs of how _right_ it feels for Keith to be doing this. He doesn’t let go of Keith’s waist, but his arms go slack. His elbows bump into Keith’s thighs, then slide down to their sides.

“…Shiro?” Keith wrinkles his nose, takes in the whole of Shiro’s face. “What’s wrong?”

“What d’you mean?”

“‘What’s wrong’? It’s not like there’s a hidden picture—”

“No, not that, I get that, but…” Before his thoughts can shock back to life and start rushing on him like a flock of headless chickens, Shiro forces himself to take a deep breath. He grabs up a second one for good measure. He makes himself look Keith in the eye. “What’d you mean by, y’know? The other thing?”

Keith shrugs. “I don’t think that’s really too… The meaning of it isn’t exactly fuzzy? Or opaque?”

“I said, ‘I love you.’ You pulled a Han Solo and said, ‘I know.’ What does that _mean_, ‘I know’?”

Shiro cringes, because that probably sounds accusatory. Maybe Keith isn’t huffing at him, or rolling his eyes, or looking anything but earnest and confused—but Shiro might as well be saying that Keith doesn’t know his own feelings. Or worse, that Keith would ever dream of lying about something like this. As he combs his fingers through Keith’s hair, Shiro can’t make them stop trembling. Can’t make the words come up any easier. But Keith murmurs at him that it’s okay, he can take as much time as he needs to get things figured out, there’s no need to rush things if Shiro needs a moment to collect himself—

“Keith, please,” Shiro whispers, hand resting itself on Keith’s cheek. “What did you mean by saying that you _know _I love you?”

“Uh, mostly that you love me and I’m aware of this? Like I said, it’s not that complicated?” Even so, Keith flushes red and pulls a face like this might not have been what he intended to spit out at Shiro. Shoulders drooping and eyes turned toward their laps, he adds, “Also, that I’m glad you said that, and I’m lucky to have you. And you’re my favorite person. And I love you, too.”

_…Wait, what?_

Shiro cannot allow himself to react that way aloud. Cannot allow himself to splutter—“Wait, _what_?”

Narrowing his eyes, Keith almost manages to look offended. But only _almost_. He reminds Shiro of Blue when she crawled up on his stomach and didn’t find his abs anywhere near as comfortable as she had hoped.

“_Seriously_?” Keith squirms on Shiro’s lap, but his only intent seems to be letting out nervous energy. “Would it make more sense to you if I said it in another language? _Te amo. Te quiero. Je t’aime. Tu tiens mon cœur. Ich liebe dich. Aishiteru. Ta’ebya vel lyúbjikom. Obi’tu zv’etiamas mi’körem carugattiq. I ashaya du._ …Shit. How do you pronounce the Klingon for, ‘I love you’? _Camel_ something, isn’t it?”

“_QamuSHa’_,” Shiro rattles off without a second thought. “But that one’s not necessarily romantic? It can be used for familial love, too. You’ve got _bahng-WI’ shokh_, though. That one translates literally to, ‘You are my love,’ so it’s a bit more like what I really, really _hope_ you’re looking for?”

Keith purses his lips. “Well, right now, I’m looking _at_ a complete nerd who’s taking this confession and lecturing me on the semantics of how different _Star Trek_ aliens tell each other, ‘I love you.’ Even though he _knows_ I’m not that into _Star Trek_.” Arching an eyebrow like he dares Shiro to argue with him, Keith adds, “While also totally _ignoring _what it means that I said _aishiteru_ instead of any other Japanese option.”

“Not quite what you’re looking _for_, but… I deserve that.” Huffing, Shiro tries to drag his thoughts back into the vicinity of a track—which is surprisingly difficult, when Keith’s looking at him with neither expectations nor reservations, so openly and earnestly that Shiro can’t help feeling a chill down in the pit of his chest. Trying his damnedest not to cough, Shiro tells him, “You got the Vulcan right, though? And you did really well with the Altean? And it sounds like your Galra pronunciation is getting better?”

“Yeah, but the only things that _you_ can say in Galran are, ‘Hi, my name is Shiro,’ ‘Do you speak English,’ and, ‘Would you like to have sex with me in the restroom.' So…” Keith flips his hair off of his face. “D’you have anything that _you_ want to say to _any_ of that?”

“Yeah, I…” Shiro can’t believe what he’s considering, but… “I don’t like sand. It’s rough. And coarse. And irritating. And it gets—”

And Keith cuts Shiro off with a deep, full-bodied laugh that rackets through every inch of him. He collapses on Shiro’s shoulder, burying his face in the curve of Shiro’s neck—and he absolutely fails to muffle that laughter. Shiro’s face heats up as Keith keeps going, wailing like a hyena. About the only things that keep him from running to hide? Are the fact that Keith’s sitting on his lap (yes, Shiro could move him, but it would no doubt make Keith uncomfortable), and the trail of feather-light kisses that Keith presses to his skin while trying to catch his breath and get himself calmed down. At least Keith is enjoying this, Shiro guesses, which counts for something.

At least, when he drags himself up off Shiro’s shoulder, Keith’s face is split into the widest, warmest, fondest grin. The giggles don’t stop, even if Keith’s largely dialed back the laughter. Each round of this makes Keith’s belly jiggle against Shiro’s abs—which does absolutely nothing to help Shiro with how hot and scarlet his face has gone. But if he’s going to die of embarrassment, then at least he’s made Keith smile one last time.

“Shiro, you…” Keith ducks his chin and shakes his head, taking a long, shivering breath. His eyes go all dewy as he says, “Kashi… _Miya lyúbijo, ne má’ked umrayít lók’menya. Ya mozkrull dalik nagma vrepit’zabin_.” He purses his lips like he’s struggling to remember something, and his eyes light up when he finds it. “_Ne rachnek, ne kravell vakrom kroli, et ne yam klimen lotor._” Smiling, Keith kisses Shiro on the nose. “_Yaz táz bránök nashkel._” Then, he kisses Shiro’s cheek. “_Yaz bom javelrak ta-mečka bránök ruka._” Then, a peck right at the corner of his mouth. “_Kolije tan_…” A peck on the lips. Their foreheads nudge together. “_Koli’kolkarát._”

Keith kisses Shiro’s mouth as if sealing a promise, sucks on Shiro’s lips and tongue as if he never means to let go, ever.

When he gets a chance to breathe, Shiro tucks Keith’s hair behind his ear. “That was Galran?”

“‘s from some poetry that Zethrid let me borrow while you were gone.” Relaxing and slouching against Shiro’s chest again, Keith nuzzles at his neck. “’s from the same time French Revolution—I think it was around the storming of the Bastille, but I’d have to check?” Shrugging, Keith kisses Shiro right above the jugular. “Anyway, there was this great Galra warrior back in old Daibazaal. He didn’t have noble blood, but rose himself up through honorable rite of combat. I mean, his real story’s way more complicated because there were a lot of other social and political factors going on with his position—”

“Obviously.” Shiro chuckles. Nosing at Keith’s temple, he barely restrains himself from pointing out that Kolivan would be proud of his son for making note of the historical nuances in a story that he’s telling in the middle of what wants to be an open, vulnerable moment in which he and Shiro unexpectedly come clean their feelings.

Then again, Keith and Shiro have never done things quite appropriately, so why should they start now?

“But this warrior-poet had a lover who was noble, right?” Keith kisses Shiro’s pulse point more firmly, but not hard enough to hurt. “And his lover was male. And between that, and the poet being a great fighter, and how they used discretion? It was an open secret among pretty much everybody, but mostly, they got left the fuck alone.”

“Sounds nice,” Shiro supposes, brushing a hand in gentle circles up and down Keith’s back.

“Yeah. Except for how his lover was in France during the Revolution.” Huffing, Keith grazes his teeth over the spot that he’s been kissing.

“Alright, I can see where that might be a problem.”

Shiro chokes back a shudder when Keith bites him. It still doesn’t _hurt_—and dimly, as he edges his neck toward Keith’s mouth, Shiro _hopes_ that Keith sticks him with a hickey, come morning—but Keith works the skin as if he has a plan. As if he’s wanted this for so painfully long, whatever all Keith thinks _this_ is, and he can’t give Shiro anything less than the absolutely perfect version of the kiss and the embrace he’s held pent up in his mind.

Teasing his fingertips up Keith’s spine, under the hem of his t-shirt, Shiro sighs. “So, what does it mean? The poetry?”

“The English lines up enough with how I feel that Zethrid thought I already knew the poet and his work. Then I felt stupid for forgetting a journal over at their place when I know that Ezor doesn’t believe in privacy, but…” Keith snorts, but his face goes soft with adoration as he meets Shiro’s eyes. “_‘My love, I cannot bear the distance between us. It’s killing me when you’re away. But do not worry, do not allow your blood to tremble, and do not grieve for want of me.’_”

Taking a deep breath, Keith cups one hand around Shiro’s quivering jaw. He splays the other over Shiro’s chest. Which is probably the worst place in the world for it to be. Yet, if Keith feels the way that Shiro’s heart is pounding, then he doesn’t let that show.

“_‘I will always find you,’_” Keith says, squeezing one of Shiro’s pecs. “_‘I will always be your faithful sword.’_” He ghosts his thumb over the apple of Shiro’s cheek. “_‘As many times as you need.’_” Lips jittering like he’s been out in the cold, Keith looks like he could start crying at any moment. “_‘As many times as it takes.’_”

Oh, God. Shiro curls a hand up in his bedsheets. Tries to keep breathing so he doesn’t let this kill him. That’d be such awful form.

“So, you love me and I love you.” Shiro’s mouth can’t stand the silence. He doesn’t blame it for that—but he can’t stand the way he makes Keith tilt his head in palpable confusion. So, in the hopes of clearing this up quickly, Shiro bites out, “I want to be with you, Keith, okay? Not just on-camera, either. But do you wan—”

He stops talking when Keith plants a finger on his lips again.

The gears spinning in Keith’s head spell themselves out all over his pallor and his downcast, tightly curled up expression. In between the deep breaths he forces himself to take, Keith heaves the sigh of someone who’s staring down a decision of considerable importance. His eyes well up with dull resignation instead of tears, as if Keith knows exactly what his choice is—as if making any other choice would definitely be wrong—but every part of him wishes that he could do what he really wants, instead.

“Right now? I want to table that for later,” he says, voice straining and only sounding halfway even. The frown he gives Shiro is mixed up, but with an equal split between remorse and guilt. “I know you love me, Shiro. And I know that I love you. And I want to talk about what you’re asking me, and I _don’t_ want to talk over you about this or anything else when _everybody’s_ been doing that to you, lately? But at the same time, it’s like…”

Gritting his teeth, Keith jerks his hand off of Shiro’s chest. Grumbling, he lets his fist thump against his own thigh. “I’m _supposed_ to be giving you aftercare, Shiro. And we can get back to this first thing in the morning, I promise. Or as soon as you want to talk, tomorrow. And if you want me to stay with you tonight, I want to, so I will?”

As he curls his fingers around Shiro’s palm, Keith sighs and gets that soft, starry look in his eyes again. “I can’t talk about being your boyfriend until I know that you’re back to an emotional even keel,” he says. “I’m not gonna risk taking advantage of you like that.”

For all Shiro wants to protest—wants to scream that he knows what he wants, and he knows how long he’s wanted it, and it’s killing him _not_ to be with Keith, so how would this count as any advantage being taken—he nods because he knows that Keith is right. They’ve already gotten themselves into a mess because he didn’t think that he’d upset himself, and Keith didn’t stop to negotiate an aftercare procedure, and Shiro’s admitted issues maybe might need more attention than he’s wanted to believe, considering that they’re the reason this aftercare was necessary. Plus, it’s not as though he and Keith have handled things perfectly in the lead-up to this. In all likelihood, they’ve probably done the exact opposite of that or gotten close enough for jazz.

Between the two of them, they’ve screwed up enough for the next two years, and they really don’t need to make things worse.

“Over breakfast?” Shiro tries to smile, but likely comes up short. “Can we talk about it, then?”

* * *

As much as Keith doesn’t _like_ disentangling himself from Shiro, needs must. He doesn’t do it until he’s made sure that Shiro’s going to have a hickey come tomorrow, then doesn’t leave Shiro’s room until the beautiful idiot is finished eating. Still, feelings remain muddled, and Keith has to wait until morning for the _real_ talk he wants to have, and neither he nor Shiro will feel any better if they leave two empty glasses and a plate sitting on his bedside table all night.

Only three things currently make sense. First, Shiro isn’t full-on backsliding yet, no matter what anyone else thinks. Maybe no one else in The Gang will believe Keith about how Shiro’s doing. Maybe they’ll crow at him that he’s biased and horny, and they might throw his love for Shiro in his face like hydrochloric acid. Maybe they won’t accept the truth because it’s easier to keep pretending that they know what Shiro’s feeling more than he does—but Keith knows what’s going on now and he knows what he needs to do. And if he can’t rely on anyone anymore, then so be it. He wouldn’t promise something like, _“As many times as it takes” _without meaning it.

Second, Shiro’s face goes all soft and peaceful while he’s sleeping. He starts to get that look before he’s even fully drifted off, just lying on his back with his hair fanning out behind him and his eyes closed, sighing because getting his brain to settle down consistently proves difficult for him. Shiro’s unfairly fucking beautiful, more so than he realizes, and Keith would stare at him all night, if he could get away with it.

Third, Keith _needs_ to talk to Hunk. Preferably before his and Shiro’s disagreement can fester more than it already has.

As he skulks to the kitchen, Keith’s ready to burst into Hunk’s bedroom. Whether it’s fortunate or not, he instead finds Hunk slouched against the counter and beating a whisk through a huge bowl of brownie mix by hand. He shrugs at the news that Shiro’s feeling better, that they had a good talk and some aftercare and Keith was right about how Shiro wasn’t trying to purposefully skip dinner. Hunk doesn’t react when Keith lets the dishes clatter in the sink, either, even though he hates the sound of metal hitting porcelain like that. Keith leans opposite him and folds his arms over his chest, waiting for any sign that his friend gives a shit about what’s happening around him—and as far as Keith can tell, Hunk could not be less interested.

When he finally looks up, it’s with a huff. “Don’t worry. Most of these are gonna be for Lotor. You’ll get your own, but not too many so your idiot won’t be _tempted_ by the prospect of a delicious, chocolate _cheat day_ that he doesn’t think he’s earned or… I don’t know? _Whatever _goes on in his head.”

“Thanks, I think? But that’s not what I’m interested in.” Keith rolls his eyes at the _who me, well, what do I know about literally anything?_ noise Hunk makes while turning away. “Okay, man, you want me to be obvious? Shiro thinks that you’re mad at him, for more than just tonight—”

“Oh dude, _really_? He actually picked that up all on his_ own_? Wow, Keith, I’m so _fucking_ impressed.” Hunk’s bowl thuds onto the counter. “I mean, you’re basically throwing yourself at him like something straight out of _Star Tramps: Deep Dicked By Nine_ or _Revenge of the Vampire Nymphomaniacs from Planet Zandarr_, making soft, starry-eyed faces like the main girl from his godawful _Chronicles of Crepuscule_ books. But he still can’t tell that you’re in love with him from all of that, so I assumed he’d think that everything was completely _fine_ with _me_.”

“Actually, we’re on the same page about that, now—”

“Well, good. It only took you guys longer than I’ve known either of you and who even _knows_ how many _practice runs_ with other people—”

“Nobody did any _practice runs_ with anybody!”

As his voice rings against the walls, Keith blushes and looks past Hunk to Shiro’s door. Still closed, thank God—but Jesus, Keith cannot risk earning them a noise complaint or, worse, waking Shiro up. Taking a deep breath, he digs his back against the counter’s edge. It doesn’t help calm him down, but it _does_ scratch an itch Keith didn’t feel building until now.

“Okay, look. Yes, Shiro and I have apparently been in love with each other for a while. Yes, we’ve dated and slept with other people. But that doesn’t mean that we didn’t genuinely have feelings for anyone else we dated.” Keith hugs himself and stares at the ceiling as if it has any answers for him (which, of course, it doesn’t). “Like, yes, Shiro’s sown more of my Hanahaki flare-ups than anybody else. But you and Allura are tied for second place, behind him. And no, he didn’t have Hanahaki for Lotor or Sendak or his high school boyfriend—”

“Yeah, that mysterious Adam guy, who dated Shiro when he was a fat, nervous, blushing virgin. Which apparently means that he was totally undesirable and couldn’t have _possibly_ dated you while he was a fat, blushing adult with _two_ diagnosed anxiety disorders. Or, I dunno, what’d he call himself while he was arguing with Lance, earlier?” Pretending to pause and faking a pensive hum, Hunk turns so Keith can see how deeply he’s scowling. “Oh, yeah. ‘Enormous, jiggling, beached baby whale.’”

Keith inhales deeply and hopes it keeps him from groaning. “Am I supposed to be shocked? I _know_ how he talks about himself—”

“So do I. But I was more shocked that he stood by that one even after Ryou threw a stress ball at his head. I mean, seeing as _Ryou_ can usually leverage his twin magic and talk some sense into your idiot when he’s being—”

“He’s being unfairly harsh on himself, like he _always _does. But he’s _working_ on it.”

“See, I wish that I could trust him like you do?” Hunk eases himself to his knees. Tries to look preoccupied with rifling through the cupboard where he keeps their baking tins. “And maybe I’d believe him if his so-called ‘cheat day’ menus had more than, ‘Oh, I’ll put _peanut butter_ on my celery sticks’ or, ‘Maybe I’ll put some honey in my tea today, if I feel like it’—”

“He ate most of a Snickers bar on Monday! How is that _not_—” 

“_And_ if I hadn’t heard him describe his old body as looking like God spilled a ten-ton bucket of butterscotch pudding and slapped a pair of eyes on it.”

Keith seethes. There are definitely more mature ways of handling this, and silently staring at Hunk’s ass while debating whether or not he wants to punch one of his favorite people? Makes Keith’s stomach lurch slightly, like it isn’t sure whether or not it wants him to be slightly sick. But until Hunk comes up with a 13”x9” pan and two of the little 9”x9” ones, Keith’s tongue fee mouth feels so dry that sticking his head in a bucket of water wouldn’t make a goddamn bit of difference.

“Okay, first of all? He doesn’t have a _new body_. He has his old body—”

“Yeah, and he’s just changed the way it looks. That’s what Ryou said—”

“Because it’s _true_. Shiro didn’t get his brain transplanted into a skinny guy. He just _lost weight_—”

Clamping his fingers hard around his elbow, Keith feels like he could develop heat vision and bore holes in the back of Hunk’s head, if he isn’t careful. Like Lance would say, Hanahaki is a thing, so what makes heat vision so implausible? Sure, the issue is more that heat vision simply isn’t real while Hanahaki _is_—but at the moment? Keith is lucky that heat vision doesn’t exist outside of comic books.

“Anyway,” Hunk drawls, when he’s apparently decided that Keith’s been too quiet for too long. “You don’t need to worry. I won’t do anything to upset your _boyfriend_ with my baking. Y’know, God forbid anybody else have coping mechanisms that get in the way of Shiro’s eating—”

“Shiro _doesn’t _have an eating disorder!”

Hunk inhales sharply. With a sigh, he sets the bowl down and turns back to Keith. As he folds up his arms to mirror Keith’s pose, Hunk unquestionably looks like he means business about whatever he thinks he’s on about.

But before he can open his mouth—before he can point out that he _technically_ didn’t say that Shiro had any disorder in particular—Keith leaps in with, “_Yes_, he has behaviors that could _become_ an eating disorder. But Ulaz gave us a whole list of shit to avoid doing if we _don’t_ want to let Shiro go that way. Like, listening to him, and respecting his choices, and not telling him what he is or isn’t allowed to do, and positive reinforcement—and I still care about doing all of those! And no matter what you think, man? Shiro _isn’t_ backsliding.”

“And you’re basing that conclusion on… what, exactly?” Hunk shrugs as though he’s actually asking a question. Like he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. “How much you love ogling his ass when he bends over in yoga pants?”

“No, Hunk! I just _talked to him_ like a fucking _person!_ I asked him how he’s feeling, and I listened to what he said, and…”

Hunk’s dry smirk makes everything click into place. As he realizes what’s going on, Keith’s entire face flushes hot and red, all the way up to the tips of his ears. He grinds his back against the counter again, trying to ground himself so he can’t give in to the impulse grating on the inside of his chest, screaming at him about how much it wants him to put his fist through drywall. That impulse wants Keith to think that everything would feel so much better if he grabbed Hunk by the shirt and shook him, and screamed right in his stupid, beautiful face.

All Keith allows himself is a shake of the head, and a moment to flip his bangs back off his forehead. “God, you’re being an asshole tonight.”

“Yeah, because _you_ totally didn’t come in here with your hackles up preemptively, looking for a fight—”

“I don’t want a _fight_, Hunk! I want _answers_.” Keith’s back isn’t cutting it anymore. Hoping that it helps him any, he grinds one of his palms against the counter, too. “You’re trying to distract me and I’m fucking sick of it—”

“I wasn’t _trying_, man. I was doing a pretty good job. I mean, you could’ve made it harder—”

“Seriously, though. Why does Shiro think you’re mad at him.” Keith snarls at the way Hunk shrugs his shoulders. “I’m not joking about this. If you don’t give me an actual answer _now_? I’m gonna go upstairs and tell Lance that you had two cases of Hanahaki at the same damn time.”

“Try again!” Hunk laughs. It’s a short, mirthless, barking sound—but the mere fact that he’s laughing makes Keith cling to the counter. “Lance already _knows_ that I had to deal with that. Because, see? Unlike _certain people_ who shall remain nameless?” Hunk jerks his head in the direction of Shiro’s room. “I actually _tell_ my best friend when I’m having health problems. Or when I’m hacking up flowers over someone.”

“You’ve _seen_ how Shiro gets about my feelings for him. He wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve had Hanahaki over him.” But that’s not the point. It’s so completely off from the real point, it might as well be in fucking Singapore. “Whatever. Give me an answer or I’ll tell Lotor that you’re pining over him—”

“_He_ knows about my Hanahaki, too! He caught me hacking up purple rhododendrons while you and Lance were bickering about which of you was being a hypocrite about Shiro.” With a roll of his eyes and a shake of the head, Hunk braces himself on his counter. “We were literally _right here_ with you about five feet away. You just didn’t notice, I assume, because you were too busy _arguing with Lance_ instead of doing anything to actually _help_ your idiot.”

“Excuse me, I was defending Shiro’s honor against Lance’s bullshit accusations. And don’t try to tell me that they _weren’t_ hypocritical—”

“Oh, you don’t need to convince me. I agree with you.” Not that this keeps Hunk from slouching. “I just really, really wish I _didn’t_.”

“Well, even if arguing with Lance didn’t _look_ helpful? I needed to do it—”

“You mean like that night in freshman year when you _needed_ to drag him to the old arcade and fight about who was better at _Mortal Kombat_—”

“He offered to do that! He was distracting me so I wouldn’t _mope _over Shiro and Lotor’s spring break plans for the fourth night straight—”

“Or do you mean like how you _needed_ to fight him about which of the _Star Wars_ prequels sucks the least—”

“That wasn’t a _fight_, Hunk. We _agreed_ with each other—”

“_Or_ d’you mean like you _needed_ to fight Lance about who could build the most elaborate castle with toothpicks and marshmallow Peeps—”

“I mean like I needed to fight him to keep Shiro from _backsliding_, okay!”

As he forces himself to breathe deeply and (hopefully) calm down, Keith wishes that his body would catch fire. That would be so much easier to understand than what he’s feeling. Because it _is_ anger that’s burning up inside his chest, and yet it _isn’t_ because it already has the hollow feeling that comes when Keith’s given in to anger, broken something, and gotten nothing out of that release except more anger. This feeling is hungry, even though Keith isn’t, and looking at the bemused expression on Hunk’s face, Keith can’t remember the downsides of trying to his fist through a brick wall.

Unfortunately or not, he doesn’t have any brick walls to punch. He just has Hunk, slouching in front of with his eyes wide and his shoulders drooping, with his belly sagging over his belt because it can’t help doing so when Hunk allows himself to slouch like that. Keith’s arms tremble as he clutches at the counter’s edge, and he snarls in the face of Hunk shaking his head. God, as if he _doesn’t know_—

“Don’t play stupid, Hunk. It doesn’t suit you—”

“I have _no idea _what you think you’re talking about.” Pouting when Keith doesn’t explain things for him, Hunk keens, “_Please_?”

Keith’s sigh reminds him of a dragon, and God, he wishes that he could be one, right this second. But he also wishes that he could banish his idea of what Lance would say—_“Well, how do you _**_know_**_ that there’s no such thing as dragons? We’ve got Hanahaki disease, are dragons _**_really_**_ that much more ridiculous that Keith hacking up goth trash black roses every time Shiro so much as _**_looks_**_ at another guy?”_—so clearly, tonight is not a night where Keith gets everything he wants.

“Before I say anything else?” He makes himself look Hunk in the eye, fighting past how much it makes his stomach lurch. “I need you to get this through your head: Shiro. Is not. Backsliding. At least, not _yet_. I’m not basing this on _anything_ about how his ass looks, either. Have you seen him at the diner, lately? Paid attention during meals?”

“Yeah, but it’s not always easy to spot the _nuances_. For one thing, I _can’t _pay perfect attention to him at the diner; I’m _working_. But for another?” Hunk quirks his shoulders like he’s giving this actual thought and coming up with nothing. “He’s eaten like a bird whenever I’ve seen him lately, man. Sure, he seems picky and eats more slowly than I’d like? But I get hung up on worrying if he’s eating _enough._”

“He eats slowly because it helps him keep track of when he’s full or isn’t—”

“Not helping me _stop_ worrying that he isn’t eating enough—”

“He’s scared about that too, okay? He said his appetite’s been shit lately, and it’s freaking him out because he doesn’t know _why_.” Keith narrows his eyes at Hunk’s incredulous snorting. “Alright, I’m slightly paraphrasing. But I’m _allowed_ to be a little frazzled. I just gave him aftercare because not only did our clip-shoot get more intense than either of us realized until _after_ he got close to a panic attack? He’s also tying himself in knots about how his appetite, and how some of the crossed wires in his brain are making him think hunger feels _good_ again, _and_ he doesn’t feel like he can talk to _anybody_, except for me, and Lotor, and sometimes Ryou.”

“What are the rest of us, then? Freaking garbage-people?” Interrupting his own sulking, Hunk gets that pensive look he gets when he’s thinking too hard about the wrong idea. “Wait, did he _say_ that he thinks of us as freaking garbage-people? Does he think that we don’t _care_ about him? Because I wouldn’t go out of my way to make what _he_ wanted if I didn’t care. I’d’ve made his skinny ass shut up and eat a cheeseburger. Which I _still_ feel guilty about _not_ doing!”

Damn Hunk for letting his voice get higher and looking like somebody made him watch while they drop-kicked a puppy into traffic. Damn him twice for doing this when Keith wants to just be angry with him. Pinching the bridge of his nose, Keith shakes his head as if this might rattle the wires in his own brain back where they’re supposed to go.

“He _knows_ that you guys care, it’s just…” Sighing, Keith lets his head loll back so he’s looking at the ceiling again. The simple, uncomplicated ceiling with its utter lack of demands. “Allura thinks that there’s a problem, so she’s inviting herself to help him fix it. Pidge has been joking around with _your bestie’s_ ‘Not My Shiro’ shit, and I _know_ she doesn’t mean it? But it isn’t helping. Sven’s been running his mouth too, I guess? But Shiro was unspecific about how and anyway, Sven has his weird nurse hours. Matt’s been following Pidge’s lead on the ‘Not My Shiro’ shit and okay, I know that he and Shiro aren’t exactly _close_? But Shiro’s still upset about it and I don’t blame him. Ezor treats Shiro like a literal slab of beefcake anymore and she’s in on that game too now—and you wanna know the pièce de résistance? _Lance_ started all of the ‘hashtag _Not My Shiro_’ crap and unlike Pidge, and Matt, and Ezor? I think get the sense that _Lance_ might actually mean it when he says that abs make Shiro _not his Shiro_. And as for you, Big Man…”

Keith has to swallow a groan to do it, but he makes himself meet Hunk’s eyes again. “Of course Shiro doesn’t want to bring most of his problems to you, right now. He’s trying _not_ to make things worse and he already thinks you’re mad at him.”

“Yeah, well.” Hunk scratches at his nose. “He probably should think that. Considering that I _am_ mad at him.”

Keith had several retorts ready, assuming that Hunk would deny everything and probably try to brush it off.

He chokes on every one of them. Splutters as his lips and teeth and tongue try to shape something out of the absolute nothing that his brain is throwing at them. Void shouldn’t be able to rush. A lack of thoughts should not leave Keith’s head spinning like it might come clean off his neck in short order. And yet? That’s where Keith finds himself: gaping at Hunk as if his friend has grown a second head and coming up completely wordless.

Which Hunk, apparently, finds funny enough to snort at. “Don’t tell me you aren’t familiar with the feeling.”

“I’ve been mad at Shiro before, okay! One time, I didn’t talk to him for five days because he was being an _ass_ about my first boyfriend!”

“Did those five days end with you climbing up the trellis and in through his bedroom window, then apologizing?” As Keith’s cheeks flush hot, Hunk shoots him a _knowing_ smirk. “Go ahead, Keith. Tell me that I’m wrong.”

“…I climbed up the trellis and in through his bedroom window, and demanded that _he _apologize. And he _did_. Because he’d been a fucking _ass_ and his assumptions about Jacob were total _bullshit_.” But that’s completely beside the point. To remind himself of this, Keith jerks his head so quickly, he’s almost worried about whiplash. “Okay, so _why_ are you mad at him?”

Hunk shrugs. Emphasizes that with a throaty, noncommittal noise—the vocal equivalent of a shrug.

This is so goddamn stupid, Keith rolls his eyes and doesn’t bother trying to stop himself. “Shiro is tearing himself apart over you being mad at him, Hunk. I don’t care if you don’t want to talk about it. He’s in pain, and I need to do something about it—”

“He’s not some damsel in distress, Keith. He’s turning twenty-eight next week—”

“And you turned twenty-five last month, but you’re stewing about this like a _toddler_ instead of doing anything to help him _fix it_.”

“I don’t know if he _can_ fix it. First of all, I’d need to believe that he’s even _sorry_—”

“Why _wouldn’t _you?”

“Because this isn’t like some, ‘Oh, Shiro did accidentally something stupid, didn’t notice one or more side-effects, and now, he has to put things back together’ situation.” Hunk blows at a piece of hair that’s managed to work free of his yellow sweatband. He quickly gives up, adjusting the thing with his hands. “I _know_ he didn’t notice what he did to upset me. If he’d pull his head out of his ass, and put it somewhere other than your crotch? If he _actually_ checked himself about the self-debasing, self-denying _garbage_ that he tells himself on a daily basis? He’d figure out that he didn’t notice, either. Because how _could_ he notice, when he doesn’t bother remembering that his self-abusive bullshit affect other people, too.”

Which is almost enough for Keith to count as progress.

Until Hunk sighs and his brown eyes turn into storm-clouds. “But seriously, man? Nothing that Shiro did to piss me off was _accidental_.”

“Point taken, but he can’t even _try_ to fix what he did wrong if he doesn’t know what it _is_.”

“I only have one idea for what could make me believe he’s sorry and trust me: Shiro wouldn’t want to do it.” In the face of Keith’s incredulous huffing, all Hunk does is shrug and roll his eyes. “Well, he’s been pretty clear that he doesn’t wanna get fat again, hasn’t he?”

“Oh, what the _fuck_.” Keith grabs the first thing his right hand finds and chucks it at Hunk’s face.

Unfortunately, it’s a box of Shiro’s tea bags and Hunk easily catches it. “Oh, _I’m_ the one who’s acting like a toddler?”

“Are you _joking_?”

“You’re the one throwing your boyfriend’s green tea at me!”

“I mean about why you’re mad at him! You… Are you seriously even… I mean, are you _really_…”

Dragging his hands through his hair, Keith tugs hard enough to hurt. No, this isn’t good for him. Yes, he’s gonna need to tell Ulaz in their session tomorrow because it counts as self-harm for Keith. But his other options are screaming and letting himself have a meltdown on the kitchen floor—so, for now? If yanking on his hair can keep him grounded and stop him from completely going off at Hunk, then it’s worth the black mark on his record.

“So, he was _right_ about that?” Keith bites out, forcing himself not to breathe too heavily. “You are honest to _fuck_ mad at him for _getting abs_?”

“God,” Hunk grumbles. “Leave it to Shiro to phrase it like that—”

“He didn’t phrase it like anything. Except, ‘Hunk’s mad at me and I don’t know why, I’m sad about it’—”

“I’m not _mad_ at him for getting abs, Keith. I’m mad at him for _giving up_.”

Keith’s retort dies on his tongue. He swallows thickly as a slow-motion car wreck crops up where his brain’s supposed to be. He can practically hear the squeal of tires—crashing metal, shattering glass, and everything crunching up more easily than it should—Keith wants to wail and cry and grab Hunk while begging him to please make more sense because Keith doesn’t follow… His mouth falls open and his head shakes slowly, and Keith didn’t give either of them permission to do that… He must be fine because he’s still breathing and his heart’s still beating, but looking at Hunk, it feels like Keith can’t see him, not really—

“You,” he breathes out. “…What?”

Hunk rolls his eyes and groans and opens his mouth like he’s gonna argue—

“No, I’m sorry, okay? I’m not saying that you can’t be, or can’t feel, I’m just?” Keith’s voice goes high and tight and further into the realm of pleading than he likes. Gulping, he makes himself meet Hunk’s eyes, so Hunk will know he isn’t lying. “I don’t understand? But I _want_ to?”

Sighing, Hunk curls in around himself. It’s like his entire body’s slouching—but regardless, he explains, “Shiro lost weight like he wanted, right? But he thinks guys are _creepy_ for hitting on him at the gym. He acts like they’re gonna screw him over because, apparently? There’s no way that anyone would have genuine interest in a six-foot-three drink of water with tight abs, a gun-show hidden up his sleeves, and a thirty-two-inch waist. And he feels like he’s fuck-ugly, so did he really do the work that he swore he did?”

_He’s terrified of certain foods and doesn’t want to be_, Keith swallows down, in case interrupting wouldn’t help. _He cares about his habits more than his looks… I told you that, why didn’t you listen? Does it even matter what I tell you—_

“And if we’re gonna call you and Lance out on being hypocrites? Then we need to call out Shiro, too. Not like it’s _new_ for him, but…” Hunk shrugs like he’s trying to convince himself that this doesn’t matter to him as much as it really does. “Even if we ignore how hot he is for _you_? And how you can’t do _anything_ anymore without him gawking like he’s waiting for you to burst out of your jeans? He’s right back to telling _me_ that my body’s fine, and saying I should love myself, but calling himself all kinds of horrible shit. It’s like he didn’t even _try_ to develop that kinda love for himself—”

“He _did_ try!” The protest jumps out of Keith before he can stop himself. “The fact that you didn’t always see it? Didn’t mean that he didn’t _try_. He’s been working on that since he was _twelve_. And just because he went after something other than the rest of us wanted for him—”

“Whether or not he did the work on how he feels about his body, though? He’s still trying to be somebody that he’s not.” Hunk rubs at the bridge of his nose while he’s thinking about his words. “None of us in The Gang fit in with normal people. Pidge and Matt probably get closer than the rest of us, but neither of them really manages it, either. We’re all queer as Hell, two of us are autistic, we just about pay Ulaz’s salary because not a goddamn one of us is emotionally stable—Hell, most of us couldn’t pretend to be that for a Halloween costume. None of us is even remotely fucking _normal_…”

Another shrug, and Hunk keeps failing to seem casual. “But I guess that getting conventionally hot to appease the _normal people_ and their standards? Matters more to your boyfriend than anything he might’ve had with one of his so-called best friends.”

He wants to give Hunk an answer right away. This conversation is important, and they need to keep moving, and if nothing else? Keith started it.

Slumping harder on the edge of the counter, though, Keith can’t even make himself look at Hunk’s belly. Never mind meeting Hunk’s eye—that feels impossible, right now. Shuddering as he breathes in, Keith looks past Hunk’s shoulder at Shiro’s bedroom door. It’s still closed, without a sign that Shiro’s stirred at all. He curls his fingers up tighter and lets his eyes settle on the bowl of brownie mix. Jesus, he stormed in here and interrupted Hunk in the middle of his coping mechanism. He _knows_ what stress-baking looks like for Hunk, he _knows_ how important that is for Hunk’s mental health and overall wellbeing—

“I’m sorry,” Keith mutters, eyes locked on the floor.

“Wait, what?”

“I’m _so_ sorry, I didn’t know… Or think about that, either—”

“Wait, are you seriously going on, like—”

“I made this all so shallow, while I’m accusing you of doing that over what Shiro—”

“Oh my God, Keith—no. No, _no_. You stop that, right now. It’s not your—”

“But I was only thinking about _Shiro’s _side of things between you, not—”

“Yeah, but come on. Of course you’re biased toward him. Look at what he means to you—”

“But you matter to me too, Hunk!” The counter feels like it could break Keith’s skin and tears sting as they well up in his eyes—but he makes himself look Hunk in the eye because this is_ important_. “Not in the same way that I love Shiro, no. But I care about you and didn’t even—”

“It’s not like you were _wrong_ about me stewing on this—”

“No, I _wasn’t_ wrong. And I stand by most of what I said. I still could’ve done it _better_—”

“Maybe, sure. You were _upset_, though. And you just got done trying to give him aftercare—”

“I threw Shiro’s tea-bags at you. Like _he’s_ the only one who this is hard for—”

“You didn’t hit me! And if you would’ve, it wouldn’t have hurt—”

“That’s not an _excuse_, Hunk, and you _know_ it.” Keith breathes a little easier when Hunk doesn’t try to argue about that point. Not by much—but by enough that he get his nerves settling down. And his head feels less muddled, his chest feels less flushed, he feels more like he can manage acting like the adult that he’s supposed to be—“Your anger makes sense, okay. Even if Shiro’s tearing himself up about it, which he _is_, you shouldn’t try to _stop_ being angry for his sake, that won’t help anybody—”

“I don’t think I could pull that off anyway.” Hunk sighs, and his eyes dart up toward the cupboard where he keeps most of his baking mixes. “I mean, I can _pretend_ if it’ll make him stop ripping himself a new one. I want him to apologize and stuff, but—”

“Pretending that you aren’t angry won’t help either.” Thinking about that option makes Keith’s heart shudder like it’s trying to drag him back in time, back to any of the moments when he was the one trying to pretend he wasn’t angry. When he was a dumb kid, digging his fingernails into his palms to try and keep himself from punching someone, feeling like he had a volcano pent up inside his chest. “But what you _can_ do? I’ve got two ideas—”

“I’ll take pretty much any tips you wanna give me, Keith. Because I’ve got absolutely nothing—”

“I mean, in general?” Trembling though he is, Keith blinks the tears out of his eyes. He looks at the bridge of Hunk’s nose because it approximates eye-contact well enough, and Keith’s skin already feels like it’s crawling. “Let yourself be mad. Let yourself stress-bake even more right now. I don’t care how tempted or not he feels. You need to bake, so I’ll keep him from being obnoxious. But if you’re staying mad at Shiro? Maybe use that anger to try and _fix things_. Instead of just lashing out at him and brooding until your friendship might as well be dead.”

Keith expects a fight. A protest, at the very least. Instead, Hunk sags at the hips and nods, and supposes he deserves to hear that.

With his permission to go on, Keith sighs. “Look, Shiro needs help to work on some of his issues. I’m trying to give it to him. We’re getting breakfast at the diner tomorrow, and he said that he’d split a strawberry milkshake with me—”

“I’m not doctoring his milkshake for you, Keith. I don’t care which kind of doctoring you want, I’m not doing—”

“No, dude, not that. I’d never ask you to do that to anybody. Least of all Shiro.” He gulps. Gives up on the counter so he can hug himself while he admits, “Tomorrow’s gonna be hard enough for him as is, okay. So, please don’t push him. Don’t glare at him from behind the counter. Don’t ask him what he’s eating or how it tastes, even if you want an opinion. Don’t make him feel like he’s being put under a microscope, or I swear to God—”

“What?” Hunk snorts. “I do any of that and you’ll _fight_ me?”

Keith shakes his head. “Make this harder for him, man? And I’ll tell Lance about this conversation.”

Hunk furrows his brow. “I don’t follow.”

Shoving himself up off the counter and heading for Shiro’s room, Keith sighs. “I’ll tell him that his best friend is sitting on a ton of feelings that you won’t talk to me about. I’ll make it sound worse than it is, and set Lance loose to pry and meddle and do whatever he wants. And while he’s hung up on _your_ problems for a while? I’ll use those couple weeks to drag Shiro back on-track.”

“Keith, that’s _cold_, even for you.” Hunk turns and clears his throat until Keith’s looking at him. “Seriously, you don’t need to threaten me like that.”

“Don’t test me about how seriously I take Shiro’s well-being.” Keith curls his hand around the door-handle. “Anyway, I hope you sleep okay, whenever you’re done baking. I need to go big spoon my idiot, in the meantime. Make sure he doesn’t decide that he doesn’t have _me_ in his corner.”


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the most part, this chapter consists of Sheith and Lotor getting breakfast together.
> 
> There is, however, some discussion of how Shiro’s coping with some of The Gang’s reactions to his weight loss—Lance’s in particular, though he’s not the only one at fault here—and how the disconnect between their perceptions and his own is messing with his head and his emotions.
> 
> Additionally, Shiro talks at some length about having his first existential crisis when he was younger over an episode of a Winnie the Pooh cartoon whose plot revolves around Tigger losing his stripes and everyone in the Hundred Acre Wood, except Eeyore, declaring that he cannot possibly be Tigger because Tiggers have stripes. Because he allegedly can’t be himself, Tigger is subjected to various humiliating experiments in trying to figure out who he really is, all while being low-key gaslit whenever he tries to insist that he still feels like himself on the inside, regardless of what he looks like.
> 
> **[I only wish I were making this up](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xyohw2).**
> 
> It’s called “Stripes,” eighth episode from the first season of _The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh_. My family had a copy of it on VHS when I was a kid and it actually did mess me up in pretty much the exact way that Shiro gets messed up (—because if we can’t project onto our faves when writing fic then we have just lost ourselves as fans and as a culture). It actually messed me up so badly that there was a time in middle and high school when I convinced myself that I must have made the episode up in my head because I had that much trouble dealing with the fact that it was real and had destabilized my four-year-old self’s sense of reality and identity so much.
> 
> But, no. It is a real episode of a real show for children that aired on the Disney Channel and got circulated on VHS tape episode compilations…… and its plot consists entirely of Tigger’s friends invalidating his identity and gaslighting him about it for most of the ten-minute runtime (also! featuring one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard, all about how Tigger still feels the same on the inside).

The problem with getting a strawberry milkshake on Friday morning makes itself obvious when Shiro gets home from his morning “10km and a little extra, give or take.” Turning off his mp3 player in the middle of “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go,” he ambles out of the stairwell and down the corridor. He’s removing his earbuds when he makes out the figure standing in front of their door. Tall and thin, carrying a messenger bag and cloaked in a long black trench-coat that gives him a little extra width in the shoulders, shaking out his purple ponytail like a horse batting away flies—

“Hunk and Keith already bought our Girl Scout Cookies for the year.” Shiro sidles up to Lotor, fumbling in his pocket for his keys. “I mean, I assume that you’re here because Zethrid’s troop needs you to peddle some extras for them.”

“Or because I wished to be here.” Following Shiro inside, Lotor sniffs. “Darling, _please_ tell me that you were not out running in this weather.”

“It wasn’t that bad. The sidewalks were totally clear. Nothing to slip and hurt myself on.”

“It’s freezing, though. Why would you subject yourself to this.”

“I mean, yeah, it was kind of cold? But that just helped clear my head and wake me up.” 

“You have a gym membership for a reason. Not to mention a standing invitation to the equipment that Zethrid houses in our basement. You could have gone to either of these places for your morning cardio.”

As if this helps make his point, Lotor shucks off his coat and drapes it over the back of the couch. Even without that outermost layer, he’s swimming in a heavy, hot pink sweater that he must have borrowed from Zethrid. Only Hunk and Ryou are still big enough for their clothes to drown out Lotor’s body quite like this, and neither of them would wear that color. Beneath the gaping V-neckline, Shiro can pick out the collars of at least two t-shirts—and then Lotor clears his throat. He fake-coughs as if it’s taking him incredible effort not to accuse Shiro of either staring at guys other than Keith with lust in his heart, or of beating himself up for not having the same naturally lithe build that Lotor does.

Pursing his lips so tightly that they almost disappear, Lotor throws Shiro a _Pointed Look_. “Are you entirely done surveying the merchandise, darling? Or do you need another moment to mentally compare our bodies?”

“I wanted a better sense of what you’re wearing. Hand to God, I was just trying to guess what you’re thinking about the weather.”

“I am thinking that it’s almost March and still feels like the dead of December outside.” Huffing, Lotor flips his cowlick off his face. The way he narrows his eyes suggests that he is in absolutely no mood to get jerked around about anything. “Also, that you have, as previously mentioned, a gym membership. Therefore, you didn’t need to take your morning run out in the Massachusetts tundra when, apparently, we are currently in the running to host a second world headquarters for Santa Claus and his motley crew of arctic miscreants.”

“Well, as I previously mentioned? It wasn’t that bad, Barbie. I didn’t feel like going there, then coming back here to get Keith, then doubling back to the diner.” Shrugging out of his hoodie, Shiro lets Lotor get a good look at his long-sleeved t-shirt. “I had layers on _and_ I was running—”

“Perhaps you should rouse Keith, if you’re in the mood for this approach—”

“You mean the approach where I point out that physical activity keeps you warm?”

“The approach where you show off your technically good physique as though it’s meant to impress me.” Stretching his arms up over his head, Lotor leans into the yawn that comes up out of him, tries to play up how deep it goes. “I admire and respect the work that you put into this, of course. But alas, my heart belongs to another. How terribly unfortunate for you.”

“Yeah, sure.” Shiro smirks and shakes his head affectionately. “Besides, I’m not fat enough for you anymore, right.”

“Perhaps if you had an iota of interest in regaining any of the weight? But without that…” Lotor drops back into place with a shrug and gives Shiro a limp, half-baked smile. “Also, I suspect that Hunk would be more interested in feeding me, if he ever wanted to experiment with our kink.”

“He probably wants to feed you anyway, regardless of kinks. He likes making people happy, and food’s part of how he does that.” Shiro quirks his shoulders and heads for the kitchen, trusting Lotor to make himself at home however he likes. After all, he knows where everything is and that he has a standing invitation to most of it. “You want a drink or anything? I need to rehydrate before I get in the shower. Or you could come over here and get yourself one of these…”

Once Lotor’s looking his way, Shiro points at the heaping plates of brownies that Hunk left out on the counter. One plate has a placard that identifies its treats as Hunk’s special dark chocolate cherry-flavored ones and the cream cheese brownies that he makes with his Grandma’s recipe. The bold letters at the label’s head read, _“_**_For Keith’s Consumption Only!_**_”_

The middle two plates are easily the biggest and their brownies are stacked the highest, which makes sense considering that Hunk’s set these aside for everyone who wants any. According to the note that Hunk left behind, the darkest-looking ones are dark chocolate fudge-flavored, the ones with lighter tan patches in their batter are peanut butter cup brownies, the ones with the topping that looks like frosting are chocolate-covered strawberry brownies (_“I used a ‘skinny’ recipe for them, Shiro, so please try one? ♡”_), and the ones with the shiniest tops have salted caramel sauce baked into them.

Finally, there’s the plate with saran wrap over its offerings and the label that warns, _“_**_DO NOT TOUCH! unless your name is _****_LOTOR!!!_**_” _Two kinds of brownies sit out here. First, a set of Hunk’s Nutella-stuffed brownies with chocolate ganache frosting and chocolate shavings on top. Second, a dark brown set with sugary green spots in the batter—and Lotor’s entire face lights up at the sight of them.

“Oh my stars,” he whines softly, clasping his hands together and holding them to his lips. “Dark chocolate _mint chip_ brownies…”

Slumping by the sink with his water, Shiro furrows his brow. “What are you doing?”

Although Lotor shakes his head as though he cannot be bothered, he explains, “Praying to Alor and Amue, the pre-Christian Altean deities of love.” At Shiro’s chuckle, Lotor flips him a middle finger without unclasping his hands. “Scoff all you like, darling. I need to show the Heavenly Twins proper gratitude for blessing me so thoroughly and leading my affections toward someone so generous and creative. Seeing as I do not have incense or my votive candles on-hand…”

“I’m not scoffing,” Shiro says gently, smiling even though Lotor isn’t paying attention. “I love your drama, always have. And I’m happy for you getting to reconnect with your Altean heritage and faith. I just didn’t expect a serious answer to that question.”

“Yes, well, I suppose I shouldn’t be terribly surprised by that. You also didn’t expect that my flirting with you was in earnest until I put my tongue in your mouth.” Pouting at Shiro with a frankly unnecessary round of sad puppy eyes, Lotor says, “Now, please shush your beautiful face and let me focus.”

Which is an easy enough request to honor. As curious as he is about Lotor’s faith—as much as Shiro wants to listen in on Lotor’s impromptu devotional moment and learn what he can—Lotor wants the illusion of privacy.

For his own part, Shiro wants to be a good friend. Even if he didn’t, he wasn’t kidding about how he stayed warm while on his run. That was great outside, but now, it’s getting on Shiro’s nerves. Unfortunately, rolling up his sleeves and finishing his water hasn’t let Shiro feel like he’s cooling down any. In the hopes of maybe improving his situation, he gets another glass-full and strips to his tank-top. Sweat keeps the black cotton fabric stuck to his skin like it’s been super-glued in place, and Shiro shouldn’t feel uneasy about that. After all, it’s hardly an uncommon state of affairs for him anymore. A sticky and slightly stomach-turning state of affairs, yes, but not one that should genuinely fill Shiro with the sense that he’s standing underneath the other shoe, it’s about to get dropped onto his head, and for extra measure, someone took the pleasure of stuffing said other shoe with a fifty-pound brick of chromium.

By the time Lotor slouches into the kitchen with a mind to borrow some of the coffee, Shiro’s downed another glass of water. Even so, he’s fast losing the head-clearing benefits that he got out of his run, slipping into a feeling like his brain’s gotten swept up into a swamp and pulled under the murky water. Taking a long sip out of Keith’s _Return of the Jedi_ mug, Lotor rests himself beside Shiro at the sink.

“Did I hear you mention heading to the diner,” he says mildly, trying to sound like he isn’t up to anything.

Nodding, Shiro digs a palm against the counter’s edge. “Keith and I are getting breakfast before he has to go to work.” He makes his lips curl up into a smile that feels utterly unconvincing. “He probably won’t mind if you tag along.”

“I actually needed a ride because I have a session with Ulaz and don’t feel like meandering through the cold. But I also didn’t get to eat before Acxa needed to leave, and she brought me over here, so… Thank you for the halfway invitation.” Sighing softly, Lotor wrinkles his nose at Shiro. “Darling, if you got yourself sick by running in this weather, I will be terribly cross with you.”

“I don’t feel sick so much as…” Shiro shrugs and makes a noncommittal sound. “I was so excited to _not_ feel like I was freezing, for once. And if it felt like… If the heat was _louder_? Then I’d go, ‘Okay, I maybe feel sick and that sucks.’ But I just feel like I can’t calm down. Except with heat, not anxiety. And it’s not like I get _legitimate_ fevers that often, so like? Is this a thing? Am I broken?”

Lotor takes a deep breath and lets slip a pensive hum. “You are not broken. If this continues, then I might find reason for concern. But you will still not be _broken_.” Squeezing Shiro’s shoulder, he smiles. “At present? I think the only problem is that you rapidly transitioned from the arctic wasteland to a comfortably heated interior.”

“Makes sense, yeah…” Rubbing at the bridge of his nose, Shiro sighs into his palms. Lotor’s theory gets Shiro breathing more easily, even though his head’s still swimming. “If you think about it? I should just be glad this isn’t as bad as it used to be.”

“As far as I’m concerned? Haggling over that comparison sounds like an exercise in making yourself feel horrid.” With a soft huff, Lotor pats Shiro between the shoulder-blades and manages to be reassuring. “Go take your shower, darling. You’ll feel better when you get out and Keith will probably be awake as well.”

* * *

Fortunately, Keith _is_ awake by the time that Shiro gets out of the shower. He’s feeling cooler, too.

At least, that’s true until Keith sidles up into his personal space. The t-shirt he’s wearing—a black number with the red and gold Gryffindor coat of arms emblazoned on the chest—stretches so tightly on Keith’s middle that Shiro can hardly believe that Keith can get away with wearing it at work. Between the hem rising on his tummy and how the waistband of his jeans slices into his soft, pale flesh, Keith has a little roll of chub exposed. No, he isn’t flashing nearly as much skin as he could, given the opportunity—but Keith shimmies while he’s stretching out. Not only does he pull his t-shirt even higher up his pudgy stomach, he also makes that his rolls wiggle like he’s begging Shiro to reach out and grab a handful.

As Keith snakes his arms up around Shiro’s shoulders and presses himself close to Shiro’s abs, it’s everything Shiro can do to hug his boy, rather than groping him. Would he like to grope Keith? Absolutely, yes. But Lotor’s arching an eyebrow at them from the kitchen table, pointedly sipping his coffee as if to scream, _“Oh Heavens no, darlings, don’t mind me. Pretend that I’m not even here.”_

It’s a similar story in the car: Lotor sits in the backseat, where he has a perfect vantage point to notice Shiro stealing glimpses of Keith’s belly and how it pooches out toward his lap. Not that anybody could hold that against Shiro. For the most part, he keeps his eyes on the road; he appreciates Keith’s body, but Shiro _knows _how to keep them all from dying. Still, Lotor clears his throat at more than one red light on the way into town. Each time, he keeps it up until Shiro dignifies him with attention—and then, all he ever does is smirk like he knows a terribly juicy secret and needs to lord this fact over Shiro.

Once they’ve put in their breakfast orders at Sal’s, Shiro has a mind to ask what Lotor thinks he’s on about. In his head, it’s an impressive moment, one where Shiro defiantly puts his arm around Keith’s shoulders and looks Lotor in the eye while pointing out that he owes Shiro an explanation, if he’s going to keep pulling faces like he has been.

In reality, Shiro curls his arm around Keith’s shoulders as he planned. Except, when he turns to Lotor with a mind to point out how his friend’s been acting, Lotor has his eyes glued to his phone. In and of itself, that might not be cause for concern—but Lotor’s wearing a tight-lipped grimace like he just watched someone fail to clean up after their dog out in the park. Or possibly like Cova’s in a strop at him again and decided to throw up in Lotor’s most very favorite, immaculately maintained combat boots.

“I’m fine, darling,” Lotor sighs as if he wants to believe this, himself. “Nothing serious.”

Keith huffs and rests his head on Shiro’s shoulder. “Yeah, that doesn’t really sound like, ‘Fine.’ It sounds like, y’know, the _opposite_ of fine.”

“That sounds like it’s on your interpretation more than on me or anything I’ve told you, Keith.”

“Uh, it sounds like there’s something going on with you, and you’re reacting to it. So, you’re trying to be fine, but you aren’t quite there, yet.”

“Suppose that you had to deal with an obnoxious customer who wasn’t bad enough to entirely derail or upset your day—”

“What’s going on?” Shiro sighs, barely resisting the urge to rub at the bridge of his nose. “I believe that you’ve got a handle on things, more or less. I believe that you’re _going _to be fine. But Keith’s right about how _something’s_ going on with you, and about how you aren’t fine right this exact second or any—”

Groaning, Lotor shoves his phone at Shiro. “If you absolutely _must_ pry on something that I would rather ignore.”

_Yeah right, sure_, Shiro doesn’t allow himself to say because it would only exacerbate things and put Lotor on the defensive. _You’re only sulking and snapping like an angry turtle about whatever this is? Because you want to bury it and move on with your life._

Shiro isn’t sure what he expects to find when he looks down at the screen—but it definitely isn’t a page from a celebrity gossip blog, open in Lotor’s mobile web browser. Most of the time, Lotor has absolutely no patience for these kinds of sites. Still, he wouldn’t have pulled this up without a reason—and judging by the way he’s slouching, said reason is more important to him than Lotor wants to admit—so, Shiro will push through this.

Shifting around so Keith can see the screen as well, Shiro squints at the collection of slightly out-of-focus photos. They’re set on a beach somewhere, and all of them feature a slim, toned, Hollywood-ready guy and a girl who seem exclusively interested in tangling themselves up together in defiance of anyone who might not want to watch them making out. When they aren’t enthusiastically playing tonsil-hockey, they’re either walking around or lounging in the sand. Whatever they do with themselves, though, they’re never once outside of arm’s length of each other—mostly because they keep their hands intertwined like little kids holding onto their buddies while they’re on a field trip to an art museum.

Looking at her, Shiro feels like he recognizes something about her face. Problem is, even without the large sunglasses that she has in some of the pictures, her face isn’t that memorable. Maybe there’s something about her messy blonde bun? Her tanned body looks nice in that black bikini, Shiro guesses, but getting down to brass tacks, she could be pretty much any of the innumerable young, white, blonde starlets out in Hollywood.

Something about the guy looks more familiar and nags at Shiro so much more intensely. From his shock of white hair to his mahogany skin, to the way he sneers even while his ostensible girlfriend’s sucking face with him—everything about the guy feels like Shiro _should_ know who he is. This isn’t the vague, _“I know that I’ve seen him somewhere before” _feeling that he gets every time he recognizes a TV guest star and has to plumb their IMDB page until he remembers why. _Something _about the guy in these pictures screams that Shiro _knows him_—the name for this face is right on the tip of Shiro’s tongue, ready to take a swan-dive out of his mouth—and as he paws through the different shots, that recognition claws at Shiro’s brain like a monster in a horror movie.

Things don’t click into place until he hits a picture that gives him a full-on frontal look at this guy’s pointy, high-cheeked face.

“Oh, my _God_.” Looking back at Lotor, Shiro can’t help gaping. “This is _Sincline_? Really?”

“I am afraid so.” Lotor scowls like he wishes he could vomit and purge himself of the perpetual disgust that he gets from anything related to his blood family. Resting his cheek in his hand, he sighs. “It is absolutely worse than it appears, as well. Did you read the headline?”

Skimming over the so-called article and its vague suppositions about what these lovebirds are doing in Mexico together, Shiro scrolls back up to the top. The oversized black letters at the head of the page read, _“Jennifer Lawrence Canoodles in Cabo with Billionaire Bad Boy.”_

“Jesus,” Keith grumbles. “Is it bad if I can’t tell who’s coming off worse in that pairing? Because it kinda sounds like both of them are slumming it.”

“If it were almost anyone _but_ Jennifer Lawrence, I would feel much worse for her. My brother can perform quite the charm offensive when he wishes. No doubt, he has told her a good many lies about how special she is to him, how much he values her, and how she makes him feel so loved.” Shrugging as if it trying to forget all the times when Sincline ever lied to him about having his best interests at heart and only ever wanting to protect his little brother, Lotor adds, “In reality, though, Sincline was on Merla’s arm for the Golden Globes, as usual. Given his history, I would bet that he is merely using Ms. Lawrence as a distraction and a means of spiting the _true_ queen of his heart over whatever asinine lovers’ quarrel they are having _this_ time.”

“Yeah, well, looks like that’s about mutual.” Shiro hands back the phone and points at the page that he clicked over to. “Apparently, Merla’s been gallivanting around Ibiza with Zac Efron. Think they’ll be keeping up this farce by the Oscars, or…?”

Rolling his eyes, Lotor makes a throaty, noncommittal sound. “Personally, my strongest feeling is a wish for my brother to get eaten by sharks. But considering that this is statistically less likely to happen than one of the three of us ever having a Hanahaki flare-up that requires legitimate medical attention? I’d prefer not to think about it at all.”

Fair enough, and Shay makes moving on easier by popping over with a tray of drinks. Water and coffee for Shiro, coffee and Cherry Coke for Keith, and coffee, water, and orange-juniberry juice for Lotor. As though that weren’t enough glasses for their booth, there’s also the strawberry milkshake with two straws. Winking at Shiro, Shay sets the metal cup with extra in front of Keith—and there are so many things that she could mean by that? But whatever’s going on here, Shiro ducks his chin and can’t help blushing. His arm stays around Keith, though. It’s like Shiro’s muscles don’t want to let him move them, and with a soft sigh, Keith nestles closer to his side.

When Shiro manages to look up again, Lotor’s blinking at a bright green milkshake sitting right in front of him.

“I think there’s been a mix-up?” He forces a weak, apologetic grin. “I didn’t order this.”

Shaking her head and smiling way too brightly for working in the service industry at this hour, Shay gives Lotor his cup of extra milkshake. “Mint chocolate chip and double-thick, compliments of Hunk,” she chirps. “He heard about something nice that you did for Lance and said he wanted to send a little treat your way.”

She quirks her shoulders by way of saying that this is neither her circus nor her monkeys, so she didn’t push Hunk for any further details. With a bright, beaming assurance that their breakfasts should be up in a jiffy, Shay departs to refill another customer’s drink for them. Even once she’s gone, though, Lotor remains the same pink shade as his oversized sweater, as if he can’t rein in the blush that’s spilled out on his cheeks. Watching him fumble with his straw would be cute if he didn’t look like he’s either unsure which side of the Looking-Glass he’s on or about to pass out at any second.

Toeing at his ankle under the table, Shiro gives Lotor a small smile. “So… what nice thing did you do for Lance?”

Lotor shakes his head and manages to get a sip of milkshake. But now, he’s apparently allergic to making eye-contact.

“_Lotor_,” Shiro play-drawls, arching an eyebrow. “Come on, Ballerina Barbie, you can tell us. You’re among friends—”

Curling an arm around Shiro’s waist, Keith makes a sound like he could quibble with that description. If he weren’t smirking like a cat who got into the really quality cream, Shiro might take issue with Keith even pretending that he and Lotor aren’t friends. As it stands, however—

“Alright, you’re among a friend and Keith. Who will act like your friend if I ask him to—”

“Or if you tell me that whatever you did involved Lance getting handcuffed to another tree,” Keith deadpans. Snickering, he nuzzles at Shiro’s arm and nudges their milkshake toward him. “Hell, if you did that, I will finally listen to Shiro and say that we are actual friends.”

“There were no trees involved. Nor handcuffs. Besides, Ryou and Allura most likely would have killed me for doing that to Lance when it got down to five degrees below freezing last night.” Blushing an even darker shade, Lotor slouches onto his elbows. “I offered Lance assistance with something and because we had a tacit agreement to confidentiality, I do not wish to discuss it further. Is that acceptable to both of you?”

It is, and with a heavy sigh about how he needs a new topic of conversation immediately, Lotor leans back into his side of the booth.

“So, I cannot help but notice…” Sniffing, he swishes his finger around between Keith and Shiro. “The two of you seem far more casually intimate than usual. Which is quite an impressive feat, considering how enmeshed in each other you are as a general rule—”

“We got an email about a video commission. From someone who wants Shiro to top me—”

“Wait, what? When did that happen?”

“Dammit—sorry, Babe. You were in the shower, I meant to forward it—”

“Did you accept the offer yet?”

“No. _God_, no. We need to talk about it first—”

“I mean, I’m open to it if you—”

Lotor clears his throat. “As I was saying? I did not think it possible for the pair of you to wrap yourselves up in each other more than—”

“Are _not_,” Keith huffs. But he burrows even further into Shiro’s side when Lotor snorts at him.

“I once had to deal with you drunkenly whining at me and accusing me of trying to ruin your life because I tried to have you lean on Ryou for support while I went and found the objectively more beautiful twin.” Ignoring the blush he gets out of Shiro, Lotor arches his eyebrows with a silent challenge. True to form, Keith must not back down because Lotor goes right on: “Another time, he got drunk at a party and you had to beg him to let you use the restroom because he would not stop hugging you. Before we left for USC, Shiro could hardly help me with my packing because you would not let go of him for more than ninety seconds. At their Grandfather’s wake, Ryou had to deal with that invasive nun asking why he hadn’t told her and Father Wossname about his other brother. Because our dear Kashi was so firmly attached to _you_. And would only allow himself to cry _with you_. Do I need to go on, Keith, or have I successfully proven my case.”

Keith grumbles like he knows he can’t win this. “Still haven’t proven why it’s any of your fucking business, though.”

“Oh, I don’t purport to know if it’s my business or not.” Lotor smirks like broken glass, playing idly with the bendy part of his milkshake straw. “I simply don’t _care_. I find it curious, and I find it interesting as Shiro’s friend and creative partner. And you are, in all due fairness, flaunting your increased physical intimacy like a peacock during mating season.”

“Yeah, no, that sounds more like you with your crush on Hunk. Y’know, until you trip on black ice and fall face-first into a trashcan or whatever.”

Pursed lips and a heated sigh. “It was a pile of garbage bags that someone had left sitting on the sidewalk.”

“Y’know, Hunk’s gonna be going on a break soon, if he’s on his usual schedule. He had a bit of a rough night last night. He’d probably really like to see you.”

“Oh, really? Is that so.”

“Yeah. Really. That is exactly so, Prince Loser.” Rubbing his cheek against Shiro’s bicep, Keith whines like he’s trying his best not to go non-verbal mid-conversation. “You should go look into the ‘Hunk wanting to see you’ issue. Like, now.”

Lotor snorts and pulls a face that can’t decide whether it wants to be a smirk or a genuine smile. “That is one of the worst, most unsubtle attempts at a cover-up that I’ve ever seen,” he says, but pulls himself to his feet. “Do not touch my hash browns if Shay brings them while you’re having your little _tête-à-tête_.”

Shiro wrinkles his nose. “Like I’d even _want_ them?”

“He probably meant that for me, Babe.”

“You don’t know for sure though, right?”

“Shiro, really? You didn’t even like hash browns before you lost weight.”

“_Neither_ of you touch my food.” Holding up his hands in mock-surrender, Lotor backs away from the table. “Have a good talk, darlings.”

However temporary, Lotor’s exit should make it easier for Keith and Shiro to talk.

Then again, it should also make it easier for Shiro to get his lips around his own milkshake straw and take a first sip already. Not that he doesn’t trust Lotor, because right now, he’d rather drink a milkshake around Lotor than anyone else but Keith and Ryou. But having fewer eyes on him should steady Shiro’s nerves. In turn, that hypothetical relief should make a world of difference because of course his nerves should be the problem here. Almost invariably, Shiro’s problems go back to his nerves. Sometimes, to his _lack_ of nerve, but that’s simply a variant on the pattern of Shiro’s problems typically going back to his nerves.

Instead, when Shiro gets his first sip of strawberry milkshake down, he needs Keith’s opinion on whether or not it tastes right. When Keith obliges him, he doesn’t taste anything wrong with their little treat. Besides, Hunk wouldn’t doctor it up or anything, not unless Keith and Shiro had ordered that, and since they didn’t? Which makes so much perfect sense that Shiro can’t find a counter-argument or any point that he could use against Keith’s case. Since Keith is right, Shiro should be fine, shouldn’t have any trouble making himself drink this milkshake like a normal person. He shouldn’t chug it like a human blimp who has no self-control _or_ completely abstain like a would-be ascetic who has no self-control and also hates himself.

Except his second sip of milkshake doesn’t settle any easier. Shiro gets it down without talking himself out of anything, not even when it hits his tongue and tastes _off_. That’s bad enough, not least given how long it’s been since Shiro’s allowed himself to indulge like this and how much he used to love strawberry milkshakes. As the second sip and third hit his stomach, though, Shiro gets chills through his entire chest. The taste lingers on his tongue, sashaying around his mouth and rubbing his face in how subtly, inexplicably _wrong_ it is.

Which is more than enough to rattle Shiro, but because his body hasn’t jerked him around enough? His face and neck heat up all over again.

“It might be like with bubble tea?” Keith hums like he’s pawing through every corner of his brain for some kind of explanation. Literally anything that he can pick on and point to by way of saying that there’s nothing wrong with Shiro and whatever’s going on is not his fault. “I mean, you didn’t like _that_ before you lost weight, either. ‘Cause you said it was too sweet—”

“Because it tastes like chugging liquid sugar that’s _vaguely _flavored like something? But it can’t decide what it wants to be flavored like—”

“Yeah, exactly! So, maybe you’re trying to take too much sugar all at once? Like, if it’s been a while for you and everything?”

Although he nods (because again, Keith makes perfect sense with what he’s saying), Shiro grabs up his water so he can test this idea. A few long sips let his mouth feel cleaner, take away any lingering taste of milkshake. When he comes up from a long sip of coffee, dished up blacker than the pits of Hell exactly as Shiro likes it, he can’t help grimacing. He tries to hold it back, but his mouth curls up of its own accord, digging deep into his face and stretching itself so tightly that Shiro almost wishes that he’d just be sick instead.

The wide-eyed, quivering expression that he gets from Keith makes Shiro wish that he’d tried harder to restrain his face.

“Almost tastes like the way that _Lance_ describes coffee. Y’know, like, the swill you’d get from boiling a giant pot full of sewer rats and poison dart frogs.” Quirking his shoulders, Shiro tries not to sigh. When he fails to keep that down inside his chest where it belongs, he hopes that he doesn’t sound as pathetic as he feels. “The warmth is a little better than the cold, I guess?”

“Don’t push yourself too hard. Unless you want to.” Keith nods, nuzzling Shiro’s bicep. “I’m sorry you aren’t feeling so good.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, too. But, Keith, come on. It’s not your fault.”

“I know it isn’t. But your body’s not gonna apologize for itself. Or your brain—”

“Yeah, because they _can’t_. Wouldn’t mind if Lotor had some ancient Altean god of lost appetites up in his back pocket, though.”

“Anyway, I know how much this meant to you.” Keith huffs like he’s got an idea and no desire to rein in his impulses. “Hang on, just…”

Keith makes his intent clear pretty quickly: he means to get as close to sitting in Shiro’s lap as he can, given that they’re in public and the booth probably doesn’t have room enough for him to do this. Scooting closer to Shiro proves slightly difficult, though. Keith squishes his love handle up against Shiro’s side as if they’re back in the apartment where nobody can see them getting so wrapped up in each other’s personal space. As if no one can watch Shiro squirm while red and heat bloom and spill across his cheeks.

It takes Keith a few tries before he gives up and tugs on Shiro down by his sleeve. With a self-satisfied huff, he kisses Shiro’s cheek.

“You’re cute when you get flustered. Your inconvenient height aside.”

“You’re cute, you’re just… Y’know? Like, all the time, I mean. And sometimes, like, you make me cuter—”

“Glad we agree on that. So,” Keith says with great significance, though he doesn’t seem to know what, exactly, that significance is. “You remember what we were going to talk about, right? Because I still want to talk about it if you do. And we probably can’t waste too much time—”

“Yeah, you’ve gotta go to work like a responsible adult, eventually—”

“No, I mean that Hunk can only keep Lotor distracted for so long. Because Hunk is at work like a responsible adult who loves his job.”

“Oh. Yeah, good point. Very much so…”

Shiro takes a deep breath, feeling like he’s going to say something poignant and romantic. Something that Keith won’t be able to take because it’s so poetic and so moving, because it’s perfect and so exactly what Keith wants and needs and, most of all, _deserves_ to hear.

All Shiro comes up with is, “Can I please be your boyfriend yet? Because I still want to, Keith. So badly—”

Keith yanks on Shiro’s sleeve again. Drags him down far enough to kiss him on the mouth. He knocks the wind out of Shiro’s lungs, but as much as he can while kissing back, Shiro gasps for breath. Tries to get his caught and pinned down where it can’t slip away. Shuddering with relief and with how much he _wants_ this, he leans his head toward the hand Keith uses to brush aside his bangs. As though he can’t hear the awkward coughing coming from other patrons, Shiro throws himself headlong into sucking on Keith’s lip and making sure he won’t regret this kiss, won’t regret wanting to give Shiro this kind of privilege, won’t regret letting himself feel like he might be in love with Shiro or like he ever could be.

Inside his chest, the chills burrow even deeper. It’s like they’re trying to get at Shiro’s heart, like they want to freeze him over and turn him into ice. But he chokes them down enough to keep on kissing, and Keith doesn’t seem inclined to let him go. Until Lotor pointedly clears his throat, Keith doesn’t let up on Shiro’s mouth at all for more than a few seconds.

“Uh…” Chin ducked, Shiro scratches at the back of his neck. “How long have you been back?”

Lotor perches his pointy chin on his palm. “Several minutes, darling. But you two seemed so happy, I didn’t want to interrupt.”

Keith groans. “Then why _did_ you, though? Can’t a guy make out with his boyfriend in public without their friends being assholes?”

“Under most circumstances, I would have simply let you alone until I thought you were at risk of getting us thrown out. However…” Lotor tilts his head toward the kitchen, and as if on cue, Shay sidles up to the table, carrying a tray of food. “Making out and eating breakfast are mutually exclusive processes. Especially when two people are kissing so intently that it rather leaves me with the impression that you wish to devour each other completely.”

“No, thanks,” Shiro mumbles into his coffee. “I’m really not into that idea—”

“They won’t be mutually exclusive someday,” Keith claps back, taking his two overloaded plates and only pausing long enough to thank Shay. “Give me ample time and some help from my amazing, creative_ boyfriend_, Prince Loser? I’ll crack the code. I’ll get it figured it out.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that you can. Until such time as you accomplish this, though, can we both agree that your boyfriend needs to eat?”

Keith doesn’t put up a fuss about that offer, and Shiro chokes down a sigh of relief. God, he loves it when Keith gets feisty—but that bogged down, slightly overheated feeling swamps back into his skull with a vengeance. If he’s trying to push through that and his appetite being even more of non-existent than Lance’s comic book science-magic, then Shiro doesn’t need the additional stress of tuning out two of the people he most loves while they argue like a pair of frothing, rabid wolverines.

* * *

Breakfast doesn’t really make Shiro feel any better, but then again, he guesses that he shouldn’t have expected that. Eating in front of other people never gets easier for Shiro so much as it sometimes feels less like an infringement on his agency. If it’s ever going to get easier, then Shiro hasn’t gotten to that point yet. So, basically, wishful thinking has once again screwed him over here, and it’s not like he can blame anyone but himself. After all, nobody else made Shiro get his hopes up when he had no reason to do so.

Worse, as he gets toward the end of his food, Shiro wishes that he were having the same trouble that he usually has with eating around other people. When he’s bolstered by Keith and Lotor watching him eat, periodically nudging at his shoulder or his ankle respectively because they worry that he’s going past the acceptable behavior of eating slowly to take better stock of how full or not he feels, and into the realm of dragging his feet about getting through his eggs and fruit plate? When he feels like he _needs_ their encouragement because the smell of food is making his head feel like someone’s holding him underwater by the back of his neck and everything tastes like the gastronomic equivalent of, _“Intellectually, I realize that this is true, but it makes no sense, emotionally”_? When Shiro’s head feels like it’s swamped down in a giant mess that he doesn’t want to sort out?

Yeah, that’s a pretty clear sign that maybe, getting things worked out with Keith is the limit of things going Shiro’s way for the next week.

Yet, he perseveres enough that neither Keith nor Lotor seems particularly upset about things. They might be handing Shiro extra points because he kept sharing the strawberry milkshake. Or they might be giving him more leeway because Lotor saw Shiro possibly getting an early sign of sickness this morning while Keith knows what a mess he was last night after their clip-shoot. Maybe they only avoid pushing him when Shiro starts poking through his phone because they can see more plate than food, which is some kind of progress—or maybe they genuinely think he’s eaten enough, even though he isn’t sure of that himself. Whatever their reasons, Shiro is unspeakably grateful for both of them.

He’s equally grateful for the fact that neither Keith nor Lotor needs to head off immediately when they’ve finished eating. Having them around for a little while longer gives Shiro the chance to relax with two of the only people left who trust him. As he’s filling them in on his own plans—heading to the gym for his strength and resistance routine, cleaning up, then working on his parts of his and Lotor’s latest grant proposal, and eventually letting Lotor into the apartment to at least collect his brownies—Keith gets up to visit the restroom and possibly bother Hunk about something, but even that feels like an example of trust. Keith doesn’t think he needs to sit on Shiro to keep him from doing anything stupid, and he trusts Lotor to intervene without him, and those are good signs, no matter how Shiro’s head feels.

Anyway, whatever Keith’s feeling, he gives Shiro a kiss on the cheek before he leaves.

The gratitude and relief must not be obvious enough on Shiro’s face, though, because Keith hasn’t been gone a whole ten seconds before Lotor starts gently kicking at Shiro’s ankle. Even after a shrug and a half-hearted grumble of acknowledgement, he keeps it up until Shiro looks him in the eye.

“Whom do I need to have murdered,” Lotor says with a sigh. Pointing at Shiro’s phone as if his point is perfectly obvious to everyone, he expectantly quirks his eyebrows—and slouches when Shiro still doesn’t follow. “You’ve been scowling quite intently at that thing for several minutes. Who did what thing to upset you and do I need to have them killed.”

“Hunk probably won’t give you conjugal visits at Bay State Correctional,” Shiro tells him, more deadpan than he intended. “Also, _I’d_ rather you didn’t commit murder in my name—or even _attempt_ hiring someone else to do it—when there isn’t actually a problem.”

“I realize that getting to be Keith’s boyfriend has probably made you more biased in today’s favor. But I would be remiss in my duties as your friend and emotional guardian if I did not point out…” Huffing, Lotor kicks at Shiro’s ankle like a kitten batting around a piece of string. “You have not been making the facial expressions of a man who has no problems, darling.”

“Since _when_ are you my emotional guardian, exactly?”

“Since I appointed myself to the position, obviously. But are you trying to deny the fact that you have several problems?”

“Lord, no. I _definitely_ still have problems that have not been fixed by Keith agreeing to be my boyfriend.” Which is a good start as far as confessions go, but Lotor won’t drop things without something more. Worse, as Shiro glances back to his texts, the words bubble up in his throat of their own accord—“It’s my old friend Laura. From high school.”

Pouting bemusedly, Lotor looks up at the ceiling until finally—“Oh! Adorable, chubby Laura who lives in Maine with her girlfriend, right? Pink hair, heart-shaped face, and Buddy Holly glasses, prefers dogs to cats for whatever reason, and I want to say that she gave me a good debate about Placebo’s cover of ‘Running Up That Hill’ when you first introduced us?”

“Their cover of ‘20th Century Boy’ from _Velvet Goldmine_. And I mean, I know her more as, ‘Laura, who was one of my only friends as a kid and a teenager. Who started our high school’s first gay-straight alliance, and didn’t think that I’d hold her back as her co-president even though pretty much everybody else did, and introduced me to The Cure, The Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division and New Order, and Judas Priest. Who was one of the first people, aside from Ryou, to skip over, ‘You don’t _need_ to look like Hugh Jackman as Wolverine' and got right to the point about how he was a dangerously bad idea to have in mind for my body goals’—”

“Smart woman. I still like her—”

“Anyway, she just finally got on Instagram.” Shiro sighs and hopes that Lotor lets him get through this explanation easily. “Naturally, I gave her my username and went to add her. But I had a complete short-out in my brain, I guess? And I forgot about how I still haven’t actually put new selfies up on Facebook, much less told her and Adam about… Y’know.” In case Lotor doesn’t follow, Shiro waves a hand in the direction of his abs. “So, this is what she sends back.”

Shiro holds his phone out so Lotor can read the series of texts he hasn’t replied to: _[Sweetheart, who’s the model all over your page?]_

_[He’s very pretty, but unless you’re dating him, isn’t it against the TOS to post his pictures like they’re yours?]_

_[Are you dating him? Because congrats if so? But OMG LOL, how does Keith feel about that though?]_

Humming gingerly, Lotor tries so hard not to sneer or grimace. The effort spells itself out in the way his lips twitch and how deeply he furrows his brow. Still, that restraint might be asking a lot from him, given that he’s pulling a face like he wishes he could flip the table without making life so much harder for Shiro, Keith, Shay, Hunk, and everyone else who works at Sal’s.

“I suppose that we could get on FaceTime with her, if she’s available for a call.” Resting his chin in his palm, Lotor huffs and blows at his cowlick. When it hits him in the nose, he shakes his hair off his face instead. “Not that I can understand this in the same way that you do? But I understand why you are tiring so much of everyone saying things like that.”

“Oh, it gets worse. Laura has reasons for reacting like that. It’s not like I’ve told her anything. _Lance_, on the other hand?”

At the mention of Lance, Lotor pulls an inexplicable face. It looks like he took a long suck on a lemon while passing by a garbage dump full of particularly pungent rotting corpses. But whatever he’s on about—whatever nice thing he did for Lance and doesn’t want to talk about—Lotor keeps it to himself while Shiro clicks through his Instagram app. Pulling up Lance’s story, he goes right to the selfie that Lance made him pose for yesterday. At a first glance, it’s a cute picture—Lance grins so broadly that it threatens to rip his face apart, and Shiro looks slightly uncomfortable, but at least he managed to smile—but then there’s the caption…

“‘Chillin’ with my best bro-in-law,’” Shiro recites as Lotor reads Lance’s words for himself. How he fights off the impulse to roll his eyes entirely escapes him, because if Lance ever deserved that reaction for _any_ of antics? God, he’s earned it, this time. “‘Or anyway, that’s what the skinny clone insists on telling me he is. Don’t get me wrong, he’s super cute and still painfully in love with Keith. But until proven otherwise, he is _hashtag_’—”

“_Not. _My. Shiro.” As if anticipating exactly what Shiro wanted to do, Lotor rolls his eyes and groans. “Good gods, I cannot even… Well, no, I absolutely _can_ believe that Lance would write such captions. Especially considering that he may not realize how much it bothers—”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. And it’s what Ryou said—”

“Your brother _would _know what goes on in his boyfriend’s head more than either of us does—”

“Except he said that about two weeks ago already. And I haven’t been lying down and taking it—”

“If you ever took anything lying down? Then I would be the one wondering where my Shiro went.” As soon as he says this, Lotor purses his lips and holds up a hand to keep Shiro quiet. “That did not come out how I wanted—”

“I don’t know?” Shiro shrugs and toes at Lotor’s ankle, trying to let him know that he’s okay. “You’d more be asking what’s up with me because I’d legitimately be acting weird. Not developing healthier habits. _Not_ taking better care of myself and doing it _with_ weight loss because that’s what I wanted.” Letting out a deep sigh, he slouches in the booth. “You’d be commenting on behavior that, as far as you could hypothetically tell, genuinely wouldn’t align with what you know of me.”

“True. Though I suppose that the same thing could be said of Lance, at the moment.” In the face of Shiro’s incredulous huffing, Lotor simply puts his chin back on his palm. “He wasn’t with you while you developed said habits, darling. Nor is he as weak for you as Keith or even as weak for you as I—”

“Hey, come on. Both of you can put me in my place pretty easily—”

“True. But since getting over being starstruck over you? Lance is much more capable of telling you, ‘No’ or refusing to bend in the face of some of your more ridiculous impulses. His most common reason for aiding and abetting you? Is that both of you agree about some ludicrous idea, so he wants to go along with it. Or, like, what I really mean is… If I’m—you know that thing where…” Grumbling, Lotor flips his cowlick off his face again. “A pox upon the English language. A _thousand_ poxes upon it.”

Shiro wrinkles his nose and nods sympathetically. “Can you explain what you mean in Galran? Or Altean? Or any of the other languages you speak?”

“Unfortunately, I doubt it, darling. I’m having more…” Rotating his hand around on his wrist, Lotor sneers as if the table has personally insulted him. “I feel like I have an idea in mind. I feel like I _should_ be able to put it into words. But I cannot pin down the words that I desire in any of the languages that I speak with some degree of fluency, which makes me wonder if I’m right about literally any of this?”

“Well, you’re on the right track about me and Lance bringing out each other’s impulse control problems. He does it to Keith, too—”

“Yes. Thank you. Quite aware, but not my point. Or whatever my brain wants me to think my point is, at the moment. Which, in actuality, may not be even remotely adjacent to…” Lotor groans and throws Shiro a long, miserable look like a cat who’s gotten stuck outside during a torrential downpour. “Can you please talk about _your_ feelings for a while, darling? I’m sorry, I know that you would prefer to hear my theories about any of this—”

“But no, you need to save more of that mental energy for your session with Ulaz. It’s totally fine.”

Except, perhaps, for the fact that when Shiro turns his eye inward? He mostly finds a blank space where his feelings are supposed to be. Glancing up at the ceiling—immediately wincing from the fluorescent overhead lights and regretting no fewer than seventeen life choices that he’s made for himself lately—Shiro wracks his brain. He wracks his heart. He closes his eyes in the hopes that it will help him focus so he can give Lotor a proper answer. Aside from the fact that Lotor is trying his best and deserves equal effort from Shiro, there’s no help that Shiro can get from getting dodgy, or cagey, or otherwise trying to wriggle out of these conversations.

Yet, despite having every reason to give this question his best efforts—despite thinking with as much brain-power as he can summon up and poking his feelings with metaphysical shovels, trying to find the right words for them—the most coherent thing that Shiro finds bounces through his mind in a high-pitched laugh and a flash of black and orange—

“Tigger,” Shiro announces with a sigh. “I feel like… All of this is making me feel like Tigger.”

When he looks Lotor in the eye again, Shiro’s rewarded with a scrunched up, tight-lipped, politely befuddled look that falls right up on the border between forcing a smile and pouting like a toddler. Seems like Lotor’s face wants to make fifty different expressions all at once and can’t prioritize any of them over the others, so it’s left Lotor to sort things out himself. If so, then he might not have the first clue, either. Still, though, his face is clear enough about the fact that he isn’t judging Shiro in any way.

“Tigger as in… the bouncing tiger who lives in the Hundred Acre Wood with Winnie the Pooh?”

Drumming his fingertips on the table, Lotor does not smile or seem to take any relief from Shiro’s confirmation that yes, he means exactly that Tigger, not least considering how he is, in fact, the only Tigger who has or ever will exist. As Lotor takes a deep breath, he doesn’t seem any steadier or any better grounded. As he ponders this, he doesn’t get the impish glimmer that his eyes sometimes get when he has an idea that will almost certainly get anyone who helps him into trouble, but will leave them with some of the best stories that they’ll ever live to tell. He doesn’t even get himself to a place of _recognition_, the way he does when he follows a new concept that Shiro’s proposing for a project.

All up, Lotor’s looking more like it’s taking every childhood etiquette lesson he can still remember to refrain from making whatever biting comment he would shower on anyone else who’d said a thing like this. A bit like a dying fish as well, but that’s a function of how he keeps opening his mouth and closing it again. With each false start he makes toward saying something, he sighs like he’s struggling to recall every lesson about real friendship he’s learned throughout his adolescence and young adulthood, straining himself to his limits all in the name of sparing Shiro’s feelings.

Which, in turn, makes Shiro’s heart sink. He didn’t want to put Lotor in a position like this. He didn’t want to make Lotor feel like his non-Acxa best friend has completely lost his mind and effectively robbed Lotor of a precious stable point in his support network.

As if anticipating what Shiro’s thinking, Lotor gently kicks him in the shin. “You have startled me, yes. But I love you—”

“That doesn’t mean that you actually feel okay, though? Or that I’m not, I dunno, making this harder for you by being all, ‘I feel like Tigger’?”

“Well, darling, that certainly is an interesting thing for you to feel? And naturally, I agree that the wonderful thing about Shiros is that Shiros are wonderful things, but…” Slouching almost far enough to mirror Shiro, Lotor shakes his head. With a limp shrug, he holds up his hands as if conceding defeat against a worthy adversary. “Color me baffled. I have absolutely no idea how Tigger is relevant to your situation. But I wish to understand, if you feel up to sharing.”

“In fairness, it’s a little… specific? It’s a thing from when me and Ryou were kids?”

“As though I can judge you for specific references when my initial, ‘How to Win Hunk’s Heart And Become His Boyfriend’ plan was essentially the plot of _Funny Face_ if Hunk were Audrey Hepburn, I were Kay Thompson, and the movie were as sapphic as it should have been, had the Hays Code not stood in the way of true love?” A beat as what Lotor just said dawns on him—“Except not literally sapphic in this scenario, as neither of us is a woman.”

“Right. Exactly,” Shiro says, deciding not to quibble over Lotor’s unique interpretation of a movie that Shiro doesn’t like very much. Twisting his fingers through his white fringe, he lets his legs splay out where they fall. “Anyway. Back when we were kids and still had parents? The Disney Channel had one show that was mostly garden variety Winnie the Pooh nonsense for Saturday mornings. I can only even remember this one episode in particular, that’s how average most of it was. But I wore through two VHS tapes for this episode, which is probably a factor—”

“This must have been quite an exceptional piece of television, then—”

“Yeah, I guess that’s one word for it. Not the one that I would use, personally, but—”

“What would _you_ call it, then?”

“I’d probably go with something like, ‘disaster but in an entertaining way’ or, ‘the literal cause of my first ever existential crisis’—”

Scoffing, Lotor tries very hard not to smirk and comes up ever so slightly short. “Really, darling? I believe that you would’ve had your first existential crisis when you were, what? Four years old? I think that’s about the age when Sincline pushed me into having _my_ first existential crisis—but you honestly had yours over a Winnie the Pooh cartoon?”

“Yeah. I honestly did.”

“You must realize that this sounds a bit far-fetched—”

“D’you want to go on a field trip after you’re done with Ulaz?”

“What, do you intend to kidnap me to an art museum—”

“No, I’m saying that we could go out to the family storage unit. I’m pretty sure that, somewhere in that mess? There’s a copy of the third VHS I got with this episode.” Barely restraining a sigh, Shiro can’t help rolling his eyes. “I mean, I’d need to get the keys from Ryou. Then, we’d need to find an actual working VHS player in 2018—”

“Hunk and the Holts could repair a broken VHS player, if we went on said search. It would, however, be much easier for you to tell me the story yourself.” Lotor doesn’t hold a hand up by way of asking Shiro to stay quiet. The overly contemplative gleam in his eyes accomplishes the same result, though. “I do not wish to argue or invalidate your experiences. But before we carry on, I must ask: how are you positive that what really happened was—”

“Because I was _there_ for it, Ballerina Barbie. I remember my first existential crisis—”

“Kashi, I have watched you misplace your keyring while it was in your hip pocket. And correct me if I’m wrong, but… Does Ryou hold your copy of the storage unit key specifically so you cannot lose it anywhere?” Lotor’s eyes soften sympathetically, and more so when he hears that he isn’t wrong. Knowing him, he definitely dropped that nickname in by way of letting Shiro know that he’s only needling because he’s mystified and needs help getting his head all the way around this story. “How can you be so certain of your ability to recall these details?”

Shiro folds his arms over his chest as if hugging himself makes it any easier to admit, “One of the clearest memories I have of my Mom? Like, of the ones that are actually _mine_, not things that I heard secondhand from my grandparents, or Aunt Satomi, or Uncle Mitch?” He quirks his shoulders and still comes up feeling cold. “It’s of ugly-crying all over one of her favorite blouses because of how badly this Winnie the Pooh cartoon messed me up. Okay?”

Lotor nods and waves both hands at Shiro, bidding him to explain away.

“So, this episode opens on Tigger bouncing through mud puddles, as he does. And see, Tigger doesn’t believe in taking baths this week which means he’s completely gross. The other animals in the Hundred Acre Wood are sick of his nonsense—”

“Darling, you are one of the cleanest people I have ever met, the creative chaos in your bedroom notwithstanding…” Although Lotor doesn’t wither under the glare that Shiro gives him, he holds up both hands in mock surrender. “I am merely pointing out that your problems matter, and that they are _not_ analogous to Tigger’s muddy feet. I shall not apologize for having a slight hair-trigger about you seeming to talk that way, either.”

“Wouldn’t ask you for that,” Shiro supposes, sighing. “And I love you, too. Now, are you gonna let me talk?”

Again, Lotor waves his hands at Shiro. When Shiro arches an eyebrow at him, Lotor rolls his eyes—but he mimes zipping his mouth shut all the same.

Shiro smiles. “Thank you.”

Lotor nods without saying anything. In perfect silence, he leans toward Shiro and perches his chin on top of his clasped hands.

“So, everyone is sick of Tigger being disgusting. Not even a full minute into the action, Rabbit, Pooh, and Piglet trap him and give him a bath. But when Tigger comes _out _of the tub, he doesn’t have his stripes anymore. He…” Shiro shrugs at Lotor’s sour, bemused expression. “It’s a kids’ show that runs on symbolism in this episode, okay? The symbolism gets pretty muddy, but the point is? Now that Tigger doesn’t have his stripes, his friends apparently don’t recognize him. Except for Eeyore, who is the only one of them whose brain is working, and…”

Trailing off, he furrows his brow at Lotor’s raised hand. “Yes, Miss Granger?”

Ignoring the comparison to Hermione, Lotor puckers his lips. “Are you certain that Tigger’s friends did not bathe him in _bleach_?”

“I’m pretty sure that bathing him in bleach would’ve taken away his orange, too. And probably killed him.”

“Fair enough. More importantly: am I meant to be your Eeyore, then? Or is it Keith? Ryou?”

Which, damn him, is actually not a bad question. An unexpected one, but a good line of inquiry.

“I don’t think any of you is really my Eeyore in this story,” Shiro guesses. “You all get kinda close in your own ways—”

“Kinda close to what?” With no other warning, Keith flops back into the booth—but he stops shy of burrowing back into Shiro’s side. Narrowing his eyes, he looks from Shiro to Lotor, then back and forth between them. “Okay, what did I miss while waiting to bother Hunk?”

“Actually, you have utterly perfect timing.” Letting his forearms drop onto the table, Lotor leans in conspiratorially. “I want very badly to believe the tale that our dear Takashi is weaving for me. A perspective as uniquely privileged as yours would not go amiss, however—”

“Cut to the point or you can pay for your own breakfast, Lotor.”

He rolls his eyes but acquiesces: “Did he honestly have an existential crisis over an episode of Winnie the P—”

“Oh my _God_, Shiro.” Keith groans, kneading at his temple. “You’re telling him about _‘Stripes’_?”

“Well, he has gotten to the part where Tigger loses his stripes, yes—”

“No, genius, that’s the name of the episode, just…” With an exhausted expression, Keith tells Lotor, “Yes, that existential crisis was very real. So was the episode. I mean, he had the crisis before I ever met him, but? Imagine climbing the trellis up into your best friend’s bedroom window. Then, he isn’t in his room like you wanted him to be. But you think you can hear the TV, so you skulk to the living room downstairs, which is where you find him. And by the time you do, he is full-on, puffy-faced, red-eyed ugly-crying… over Winnie the Goddamn Pooh.”

Lotor purses his lips and _hmmm_’s. “You two _are_ aware that most people are nowhere near this blasé about breaking and entering, right?” When this earns him two equally perplexed noises, he pinches the bridge of his nose. “Did literally no one stop you from doing this, Keith? Or ask how you got in the house? Ryou? Their Grandfather? Their Grand_mother_? _Your_ fathers—”

“Uh, no? Why would they have?”

“Because you technically committed a _felony_?”

“Trespass isn’t a felony in Connecticut.” Scratching his nose, Keith shrugs. “Anyway, Shiro gave me a standing invitation.”

“I’m certain that he did, considering you two. But Shiro is not the specific Takashi Shirogane who owned that house—”

“Look, can we please get back on-track before you both have to leave?” Letting his head loll back against the booth, Shiro chokes down another sigh. “When we first started getting to be friends, I told Keith that he could call on me whenever. My bedroom had the trellis by the window, so he climbed up. I thought it was cool, so I told him he could keep doing it. Eventually, Ryou told our grandparents, who agreed that Keith could have a standing invitation as long as Kolivan and Antok were okay with it. Keith didn’t have an easy time with friends—and Kolivan was pretty impressed with him being so resourceful—so his dads said that it was fine. Are we all on the same page.”

Gaping like an unzipped fly, Lotor wrinkles his nose. He blinks so much that it looks like he’s fluttering his eyelashes—but judging from his next question, he must not get himself to whatever answer he wanted: “Speaking as someone who grew up both obscenely wealthy and painfully isolated from everyone but Sincline, our parents, our governess, and after a certain point Acxa, I am so… Do you even… Are _all_ normal families and friendships like this?”

Keith shrugs and blows a raspberry. “The fuck does any of us know about being _normal_?”

“…Damn you, that_ is _a good point. Touché.” Shaking his head, he sighs. “Carry on, darling. You were saying about Tigger?”

“I mean, I was saying that, apparently? His friends, save Eeyore, literally cannot recognize him without his stripes. What’s worse?” Shiro takes a deep breath and looks Lotor in the eye. His stomach churns like it wants to jerk clean out of him and every nerve screams at him to shut up because he’s right on the verge of tattling—but what he’s about to say is a central piece of his overall meaning. “Rabbit, Piglet, and even Pooh Bear tell Tigger that he _can’t_ be Tigger. Because there’s only one Tigger ever in the world, and see, _their_ Tigger has stripes.”

While Lotor inhales sharply, Keith slouches into Shiro’s side. Right, so if either of them had doubts or questions, they almost definitely understand where Shiro means to go with this, now. Letting himself sigh softly, he curls his arm around Keith’s shoulders and rubs gently at his bicep. It’s as much for steadying himself as it is for reassuring Keith, but if Keith minds too terribly, then he doesn’t give Shiro any clue in that direction. On the contrary, he leans his head on Shiro as if anticipating how emotionally tangled this analogy could get and preemptively trying to protect Shiro from that upset.

“Well, believing what his friends say about how he allegedly can’t be who he says and feels he is, Tigger wonders who he is and tries out being other things.” Shiro rubs his cheek against Keith’s head, which doesn’t really help his nerves—but Keith sighs contentedly, which is cute enough that Shiro doesn’t mind how tense he feels. “He tries being a bunny and gets Rabbit’s garden destroyed by bugs. He tries being a bear and gets attacked by angry bees. He _can’t_ be a piglet because they are _very small animals _and Tigger’s just too _big_. So, Piglet dolls him up like a Christmas tree, which goes about as terribly as you’d expect—”

“When I hear, ‘Christmas tree’ and, ‘terrible,’ I expect things to be on fire,” Lotor offers up in a consoling tone, once more throwing out a story from his childhood by way of somewhat defusing the emotional tension. “For example, the year when my Mother insisted on having decorative candles for the holiday season. Then, she started seriously drinking shortly before Sincline and I returned home from prep school on the twentieth. By Christmas Eve night, she had effectively shaven whichever metaphorical dog donates its hair to drunks, then had several more drinks in addition to that. Although she continued her personal research, her reason and intellect were gone. She had long since descended into paranoia. She became increasingly frantic, erratic—”

“And then she fell over because she was completely wasted?” Keith cuts in sharply. “And she knocked a candle into your tree, so it caught fire?”

Lotor shakes his head. “My Father tasked me with taking away her personal flask and bringing her to the dining room. She accused me of weakness and infirmity, of trying to shut down her work. She called me a coward, even after I told her that Sincline and our Father also wished for her to please come join us.” He quirks his shoulders. “Then, she snapped at me to get down and threw a lit candle at the Christmas tree, which proceeded to catch fire. Afterward, she claimed that she had seen some dark creature by the tree and felt a need to protect me. Worse, she genuinely seemed to believe that—”

“Like she’d know a maternal instinct if it rubbed smelling salts under her nose.” Keith wilts when Lotor doesn’t argue. “But, dude, that doesn’t even make any sense. How could she have been going through the DT’s if she was drunk?”

“I haven’t the foggiest hint of something that might, one day, evolve into a clue.” Glancing back to Shiro, Lotor sighs and tries to pull up a sympathetic smile. “But I should hope that _Tigger’s_ stint as a Christmas tree was nowhere near that disastrous?”

“Yeah, no, Tigger just can’t handle being tied up—”

“Well, that doesn’t sound like you at all, darling. As I recall, your penchant for—”

“_Anyway_.” Shiro arches a brow at Lotor as he cuts off that no doubt incisive and fantastically witty comment about bondage. Glaring might feel more satisfying, but Shiro’s head doesn’t feel up to it and the important thing here is that Lotor shuts up. “Through all of this, Eeyore keeps cropping up and calling Tigger by his name. When he does, the other animals insist that he’s crazy and remind Tigger that he _can’t_ be Tigger. When he’s bristling about how he hates being a Christmas tree, Pooh Bear even goes, ‘Oh, I wish _Tigger_ were here. He’d probably come up with something.’ Which, as I’m sure you can guess, doesn’t go over very well for Tigger. Through all these failed attempts at being other things, he gets more and more insecure.”

Holding up his free hand to preempt Lotor’s objection, Shiro swallows thickly. “No. No one thinks to listen to Eeyore. And it gets worse—”

“Tigger is already having an existential crisis because he’s a _bouncing tiger_, not a rabbit, a bear, a piglet, or a bloody _Christmas tree_.” Lotor shrugs in the face of Shiro’s exasperated huffing, as if he’s pointing out that Shiro’s hand has no magical powers. “How could things possibly get worse? At least, given the stipulation that this is a Winnie the Pooh cartoon.”

“Oh, believe me,” Keith mumbles, wrapping his arms around Shiro’s waist. “It _does_.”

“So, Piglet suggests painting new stripes on Tigger which works. He feels happy, and validated, and like _himself_ again. He’s laughing, and jumping around Pooh’s house as usual, cheering about how he’s a Tigger, he’s a Tigger, he’s a Tigger—and he’s, like, completely jubilant. Until he bounces outside…” Shiro takes a deep breath and sighs, “Right into a rainstorm.”

Lotor cringes so hard that Shiro feels sympathetic pain. “The stripes washed off?”

Shiro nods. “Thunderclap. Rainstorm sound. Then he wanders back inside, dripping paint everywhere and he sighs, ‘I’m _not_ a Tigger.’”

“Not that I want to distract more than I already have, but I must ask…” Lotor digs at his temple like he’s trying to give himself a lobotomy. “This was on the _Disney Channel_?” Getting double confirmation from Keith and Shiro. “And your parents and grandparents let you _watch_ it?”

“Come on,” says Keith, “they couldn’t _stop_ him.”

“It was a Winnie the Pooh cartoon for kids. They didn’t vet it too hard.” Shrugging, Shiro glances out the window at the snow, and the people, and the cars—“Anyway, if they ever paid attention to that episode, they probably would’ve gotten the same thing that Ryou did from it. He thought the point was something like, ‘How you look doesn’t matter. Don’t listen to anyone who tries to tell you what to be. You’re a special and unique snowflake’—”

“This sounds like one of the worst possible ways to convey that message to children—”

“Well, it was for me. Which made Ryou think I was crazy for a while, but what else was he supposed to think? I mean, he wanted to think his big brother was a superhero and there I was, crying myself sick over… Y’know. Plus, he was like, ‘But they were trying to help, they didn’t know any better’ and I was like, ‘They would’ve known if they’d just _listened_,’ which he thought was ridiculous.” Wilting, he adds, “Anyway, it gets worse with Tigger.”

“His so-called friends have already gaslit him, and triggered him into completely dissociating from his own identity. How could it—”

“He wanders around the forest in the moonlight, moping to sad background music about how he isn’t anything anymore. Asking what he’s even supposed to do with himself, now that he’s nothing. Then he has a sad song that I wish I could forget as easily as where I put my keys, but…” Shiro inhales sharply as Keith squeezes him. “‘I know I’ve changed on the outside. But on the inside, I feel the same. Maybe someday, I’ll know who I am. But for right now, somehow, I don’t have a name.’”

Thank God, Keith jumps in to say, “Things end up okay with Tigger. Eeyore comes along and gives him a talking-to about being himself. And how he’s always Tigger on the inside. So, he goes back to bouncing everywhere, and this somehow gets his stripes back—”

“Did none of the others receive consequences?” Scowling, Lotor balks when Shiro shakes his head. “They refused to listen to Tigger about anything. His external appearance changed. This was all that happened, and over that one thing, his stripes? The way that Rabbit, Piglet, and Pooh Bear treated Tigger was _appalling_. It was _wrong_. They made him lose all sense of his own identity. They made him dissociate from reality by failing to question their own preconceived notions about how they decided things should work. They _literally _made him feel like **_nothing_** because they refused to pay attention to—”

Lotor cuts himself off with a gasp, slumping forward. Glasses rattle as his elbows thump onto the table. One of his hands trembles, curling up so tightly that he might be digging his nails into his palm. When Shiro slowly, cautiously extends a hand, Lotor’s eyes burn like he could put his fist through a brick wall and still itch to break something. As he shakes his head, Lotor knocks his cowlick loose. He doesn’t put it back in place. Doesn’t reach for it at all. He stays there, tensed up and hunched over like Cova gets when he’s hypersensitive and in a _Mood_ where he’ll refuse to play nicely with anyone but Narti.

He inhales sharply when Shiro curls both hands around his fist. Another shake of the head, and Shiro bites down on a sigh.

“Lotor, please. I’m not mad. I’m not upset or disappointed.” He squeezes Lotor’s fist. “I just want to see. In case you need help. Please?”

Nodding slowly, Lotor fights himself into taking deeper breaths. They sound like shudders more than anything—like Lotor will probably cry in Ulaz’s office today, since he hasn’t gotten to that point yet—and it might be a miracle that he’s getting any oxygen at all. He doesn’t resist while Shiro unwinds his fist, though. When Shiro reveals the four bright red, half-moon indentations on his palm, Lotor doesn’t pull away. Yes, he shrinks in on himself and he can’t look up from the table. Yes, his lips press together until they nearly disappear and yes, Lotor looks as though he might be sick at any moment.

But he doesn’t pull away. It’s progress that he holds still as Keith gets the emergency first aid kit out of his bag. It’s progress that Lotor lets Shiro dab antiseptic on his hand, that he doesn’t insist on doing it himself, even though he can’t keep his fingers still.

“I’m so sorry, darling,” he croaks as Shiro wraps a bandage around his palm.

“No, you stop that.” Slouching and trying to catch Lotor’s eye is awkward—but Shiro does it anyway in the hopes that a small smile might reassure his friend at least a little. “You didn’t do anything you need to apologize for. You got upset and forgot yourself in the heat of the moment. It happens to all of us—”

“Happened to me just last night,” Keith chimes in, tone somewhere between sympathetic and pointedly simple. “I mean, I used the edge of the counter and didn’t dig in as hard as I guess you did, but same difference—” He rolls his eyes and sighs in palpable exasperation when Shiro glances back at him. “I’ve got Ulaz on Tuesday. I put a reminder in my phone so I won’t forget to tell him. Am I the one who’s bleeding right now, Kashi?”

“Well, no, but you’re my boyfriend, and I’m not sorry for being concerned—”

“I cannot believe,” Lotor announces, barely above a whisper, “that I backslid like that… over a Winnie the Pooh cartoon that I have not even seen, myself.” Sniffing, he clicks his tongue and rolls his shoulders. “Though, I suppose that the upset came more from… Said feelings were less about the cartoon itself and more about its similarities to real-life events. Which are both numerous and unfortunate—”

“Your parents and Sincline? And how they used to treat _you_ like that?”

Lotor nods slowly, but looks up at Shiro to ask, “Is that how the rest of The Gang has made _you_ feel lately?”

Before letting go of Lotor’s hand, Shiro presses a quick kiss over the bandage.

“As ever, darling, you are adorable in your insistence that kissing things better actually works. Now, as to my question…?”

“I mean, I wouldn’t say that I’m full-on dissociating like Tigger? And I haven’t gotten quite as upset as you just did? But nobody’s actually tried to force me to be somebody I’m not. Then, things haven’t been as concentrated for me, they’ve been dragging out and…” Shiro withers under the singularly unimpressed expression that spills onto Lotor’s face. Tugging gently on his white fringe, he says, “It’s been messing with my head, yeah? I know Lance and Pidge and Matt and Ezor are all trying to be _funny_ with this ‘Not My Shiro’ thing. And I don’t want to be a buzzkill or whatever? But would it kill them to lay off?”

“Without condoning what they’ve done _or_ deliberately invalidating how much they’ve hurt you?” Lotor heaves a deep breath and slides his cowlick off his face. “I do not think that Lance and the Holts realize how much they upset you with this ‘Not My Shiro’ nonsense. Ezor definitely doesn’t know, but if she did, that would not necessarily mean she cared enough to stop. Perhaps, if you asked them to stop—”

“I did, though. I got called a _killjoy_ and told to lighten up because it’s just a joke. Maybe I’d find it funny if people weren’t treating me like I _am_ a totally different person, but…” Glancing up at the clock above the bar, Shiro barely recognizes the numbers, much less what the position of the hands means. “They’re making me feel like nothing I say even matters to them anymore. Like maybe I’m _not_ myself. But if I’m not Shiro, then I don’t know who—”

_“All you gotta do is smile that smile, and there go all my defenses. Just leave it up to you and in a little—”_

“Fuck me,” Keith groans, pawing around in his backpack. “Motherfucker, why is work a _thing_…”

Until he locates his phone in the front pocket, the digitized voice of Dolly Parton keeps singing. When he finally shuts off his alarm, he huffs and tugs on Shiro’s sleeve. “I’ll get the bill on my way out, but… Gimme a kiss before I go?”

As much as he can right now, which doesn’t feel like that much, Shiro tries to make the kiss worth Keith’s while.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of note in this chapter: Bandor (Romelle’s little brother) tries to ask Shiro out while they’re at the gym, but then gets to see photos of Sheith and agrees that Shiro and Keith are cute together. Allura is nosy and kind of a tattletale, despite having maybe 60% of the information that she would’ve needed to understand the situation at-hand. Shiro has a particularly vicious flare-up of coughing up red azaleas that literally brings him to his knees, but he and Ryou feel like it’s probably still within the realm of typical Hanahaki behavior that no one needs to worry about.
> 
> Also, Shiro is so unaccustomed to the idea of people checking him out or thinking he’s hot that he has seriously misjudged poor Bandor as a judgmental creep when…… No, actually, Bandor just…… wanted to ask Shiro out, until he refuses because he has a Keith.

Getting to the gym takes longer than usual, but only because Shiro walks with Lotor to Ulaz’s office. He trusts Lotor to get there instead of skipping—neither of them’s skipped therapy in years, and they’ve only willingly canceled sessions due to medical necessity—and since Hunk isn’t around to unwittingly play distraction, Shiro trusts that Lotor probably won’t hit a patch of black ice, slip, and break his neck. Still, though: if Lotor’s in a bad enough mood that he clawed up his own hand, Shiro wants to be there for him. Not because he’s weak or can’t do things on his own, but just in case he needs anything.

He doesn’t. Not until they’re underneath the awning at Ulaz’s building, going over plans for the rest of the day, and confirming that Lotor will wait for Shiro at the Olkari coffee-shop over on Vineland. Aside from needing to work on their latest round of grant proposal edits, Lotor will want to collect the brownies that Hunk made for him. Thus, it’s easier for Lotor to simply grab a latte and wait, then bum a ride from Shiro.

He’s starting to promise that he’ll take it easy today when Lotor lunges at his chest and throws his arms around his shoulders.

Hugging back happens reflexively: Shiro’s own arms snake around Lotor’s waist and with a soft sigh, he gives Lotor a squeeze. What else is Shiro supposed to do? His best non-Keith friend is clinging at him like his life depends on this contact, and trembling like his body has no idea how to stop, and taking deep breaths off Shiro’s jacket like they’ve secretly been werewolves this entire time and Lotor finds comfort in the scent of someone he identifies as a member of his _pack_, his _family._ Shiro presses a kiss to Lotor’s temple. He rubs a hand in gentle circles up and down his back, silently swearing that Lotor is safe with him and always will be, hoping that Lotor also remembers that he is loved. There’s no way Shiro’s letting go until Lotor wants that.

“You are _my_ Shiro,” Lotor whispers, once he’s starting to breathe more easily. “No matter what any of the others say and regardless of their intentions. You are my Shiro, and I treasure you. And do you know what else?”

Several possibilities come to mind, but Shiro shakes his head. “I dunno. What else is there?”

Lotor fails to muffle a soft snicker in Shiro’s shoulder—but before he can get called out on this, he drawls, “The wonderful thing about Shiros is Shiros are wonderful things. As tops, they are sweeter than sugar. On bottom, what joy can they bring. They’re morbid, tenacious, darling, persuasive, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. But the most wonderful thing about Shiros?”

Snapping his head up, he smirks and boops Shiro’s nose. “Is you’re the only one.”

“Wait, _what_?”

That thought bursts out of Shiro’s mouth before his brain even realizes that he’s having it. He explodes in full-bodied laughter before he can think about whether or not Lotor’s making sense. In short order, the laughter peters out into snickering and Shiro’s forehead bumps into Lotor’s. Part of him wishes that he’d keep laughing. Maybe they’re out in public where anyone can hear him and decide to judge Shiro, but Lotor should know that he’s appreciated.

Except laughing so deeply makes Shiro’s head feel like a sauna full of stretched out cotton balls. When he calms down to notice that Lotor’s smiling at him, he ends up blinking at his friend, trying to puzzle out what that expression means.

“Made you laugh,” Lotor says with a shrug. “Perhaps things aren’t so hopeless as they seem”

“For once, Ballerina Barbie? I feel like things are looking up.” He gives Lotor one last squeeze. “Now, get inside before you’re late.”

Between the physical activity and the cold, walking the two blocks from Ulaz’s office to the gym should clear the muggy fog out of Shiro’s skull. He’s moving around and getting fresh air. He keeps breathing deeply as the late-game winter air bites at the back of his neck. Everything rational says that Shiro should feel woken up and roused as he ambles into the locker room.

At the very least, it shouldn’t make him feel tired or worn down—but as he’s changing in the, Shiro needs to remind himself that things are looking up. As he puts in his earbuds and his mp3 player shuffles onto Wham!’s “Everything She Wants,” he needs to tell himself that he’s gotten his workouts in on days when he’s felt worse than this before; the ability to do that is part of what he wanted to get out of losing weight the hard way. Hitting the abdominal bench for his hundred crunches and hundred-and-fifty sit-ups, Shiro needs to focus on the fact that he’s nominally taking it easy today. Part of the point is not doing as many reps because he’s trying to take care of himself.

Still, when he heads for the rowing machine—to the tune of The Sisters of Mercy’s “This Corrosion” and his pulse pounding behind his temples like he owes it something—Shiro feels like relaxing will only cost him in the long-run. He doesn’t know what, he doesn’t know why, and he doesn’t know how. But something in the back of his mind screams that letting up on himself even slightly will make him sorry, later.

That feeling sticks around while Shiro works himself through so many squats that he loses track of counting all of them. Basic squats, squats with resistance bands around his knees and ankles, squatting against the wall like high school gym class except that Shiro can actually get through the motions, now. Shiro can lower himself and push himself up without feeling like he needs to scream or like everybody’s laughing at him. He feels a burn, yes, but he doesn’t feel pain. On the contrary: as he positions himself by one of the free benches to go through his so-called Bulgarian split leg squats—propping one leg on the bench, jumping out into a runner’s stretch, and lowering himself toward the floor—Shiro finally feels like his head is clearing. Maybe it isn’t all the way to where he wants it, but it’s getting somewhere.

Sure, the brain-fog hangs around more than he’d like—but he has muscles straining in the good way and Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” blasting in his ears. He no doubt has endorphins pumping through him, and his heart flutters contentedly, like it’s proud of him for pushing through this instead of letting himself relent.

Breaking briefly between those squats and his push-ups, the only discomfort that Shiro feels comes from the knowledge that someone’s watching him. As he uncorks his water bottle, he looks toward the chest-press machine—and there he is. A quick glimpse of the guy makes Shiro choke down his feelings just to keep himself from cringing.

Thin but not _skinny_, neither tall nor short exactly, with a shocking mop of russet hair and freckles splattered all over his pointy, elfin face like they were put there by Jackson Pollock. Today, he’s wearing a loose orange t-shirt with black lettering that reads, _“I like my women like I like my men. That’s it. That’s the joke. I’m bisexual”_—which, admittedly, Shiro would find hilarious on Keith or Lance, and only finds exasperating at the moment because _this_ guy is distinctly neither Lance nor Keith.

But as he rubs hard on a knot building at the top of his spine, all Shiro can think of is the starry-eyed faces that this guy made at him and Lotor, last time they were here together. He all but outright interrogated them about how Lotor gets such whipcord-tight muscles in his legs, and about how Shiro keeps his abs so tight. Trying to banish those thoughts only makes Shiro’s mind drift back to all the incidents that have happened when he_ didn’t_ have Hunk or Lotor with him. All the times when this guy sidled up to Shiro, asking if he could watch and study Shiro’s form, or if Shiro needed someone to spot him on the chest-press (_As if I can’t handle things myself_, Shiro muses, regardless of whether or not he’s being fair).

As Shiro settles on one of the open mats, he tries to focus on the song he’s hearing—“Starfuckers, Inc.” by Nine Inch Nails—and on keeping his breaths even, keeping his head clear. Maybe he’ll be fine. Maybe nothing’s gonna happen. Maybe he spotted this guy but wasn’t seen himself and he’ll be left alone to do his own work.

Except he doesn’t get to have that very simple request honored by the universe. Because of course he doesn’t.

Still, he doesn’t want to be that rude. It makes his stomach churn like it wants to wrench its way clean out of him—but when the interloper darts over and settles next to Shiro, he pauses his song and takes out his earbuds. Because keeping his music on would _definitely_ constitute a show of rudeness. In the same interests of being nice, he forces a weak, tight smile as this borderline-explosive ball of energy.

Tucking his white fringe behind his ear, Shiro swallows a sigh. “You should really clean up first, if you want to use it, Bandor.”

There shouldn’t be anything offensive about the way that Bandor startles. His mouth falls open and his eyes bulge like they could pop out of his skull. Then, he leaps up and over to the bench along the wall with the disinfectant wipes and rolls of paper towel. There should be nothing offensive about how broadly he grins while wiping up other people’s sweat-stains so he won’t have so much of a health risk in using this mat, or about the way that he thanks Shiro for reminding him of this.

Then again, there shouldn’t be anything offensive about Bandor himself, either.

Bandor, who’s gotta be Pidge’s age or maybe even younger. Over sixteen, because he comes here on his own and there are rules about these things. Probably not a minor, or at least he’s likely not in high school, community college, or even undergrad classes over at Kaltenecker U., considering that he consistently shows up here mid-morning or early afternoon. Beyond that, though, Shiro can’t tell how old Bandor might be, or where he is in life, or what he wants out of literally anything. All he knows for sure is that Bandor is one of the last people who he needs to deal with right now.

“So, you’re getting into your push-ups, then?” Bandor smiles even brighter than the overhead fluorescent lighting. “Yeah, wow, I bet—I mean, that’s not surprising, really? I mean, I thought you always started with push-ups, so it’s a _little _surprising that you took so long to get here, but whatever works best for you at any moment, right?”

_Patience yields focus, Kashi_, he tells himself, supposing that Bandor has a point and trying to conjure up the best memories he has of how Ojiisan used to say those words when Shiro needed to hear them most. _Just keep swimming. Just keep breathing. And remember: patience yields focus._

Even more than Ojiisan’s voice, though, Shiro’s mind makes him hear what Hunk might tell him: _Dude, literally what about that little Bandor guy was _**_creepy_**_? Are you freaking kidding me, like? Shiro, come on, where did you even _**_get _**_that idea? Are you _**_serious_**_? He was being totally cute with you—a little awkward, maybe, but neither of us is in any place to judge him for that, if you ask me—and honestly? Do you know what I’d give to have anybody at the gym give me looks like that? And not those, “Oh my God, you fat-ass, just go home already, what are you even _**_doing_**_ here, this is a gym, not an all-you-can-eat buffet” faces that I always get instead?_

Taking a deep breath, Shiro glares daggers at his reflection. Whatever he’s thinking, he can’t trust it because he hasn’t been right about too much of anything, lately. However he’s feeling, there’s probably no reason for him to suspect Bandor of anything but enthusiasm. Even if it kills him, Shiro needs to get through this moment without acting like a complete jerk.

“Sometimes, I do half of my push-ups when I start. To warm up, y’know? But then, I’ll do more at the end of any given workout…” Shiro doesn’t allow himself to sigh, but takes a long swig of water in the hopes of literally drowning out that impulse. “But usually, I try _not_ to start with them. They’re one of my favorite things to do at the gym, so it’s easy for me to get lost in them and forget about everything else.”

Bandor doesn’t quite gasp, but his next breath comes in like he’s struggling _not_ to inhale too sharply. With absolutely no concern for the fact that Shiro can see every square-inch of expressiveness on his face, he goggles like he’s looking at a sideshow freak. “Wow… You really like push-ups that much?”

“I love them, yeah. They’re the best part of any workout for me.”

Shrugging even though he feels like a rubber band about to snap in someone’s face, Shiro swallows thickly. He keeps himself breathing deeply, evenly, in the same head-clearing way that he’s supposed to do while meditating (or attempting to). He doesn’t allow himself to add, _At least, I love doing them when they aren’t getting interrupted, or interloped upon, or watched like they’re the latest new reality TV craze._

Bandor’s lips wobble, but he keeps up that face-consuming grin. “Wow, I can’t even—I mean, I _can_ believe that somebody could even live like that because I’ve _seen_ you do it, obviously? But I don’t know, it’d take a _lot_ of work for me to get close to that, y’know?”

“I wasn’t exactly born loving push-ups, either. Until recently, I could barely do a full ten reps.”

Hell, Shiro could barely get through _two _push-ups in a row, during his and Lotor’s first trip to the gym out in LA. Getting that much success back then felt impossibly lucky, like a fluke result that Shiro wouldn’t be able to maintain. When he lets himself think for too long about the way he used to be—about how much weight he had to lift, and how his elbows groaned more loudly than he complained, and how he constantly lost his focus and felt his determination waver because his belly squished against the mats beneath him and even when he sucked in like his life depended on it, he could hardly get a centimeter between his flesh and the floor—part of Shiro is right there with Bandor.

Part of him still can’t believe that he can get through as many push-ups as he does daily, much less the way that they’ve eclipsed any other resistance work and become one of the best ways Shiro knows to clear his head.

Something cold and guilty knots itself up around his lungs, tightening around them and yelling at Shiro that he should probably be honest. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in losing weight how he did, like Ulaz has been telling him lately. There’s no reason for Shiro to hide the truth when he could choose to own it, instead. If anything, he should be proud that he decided what he wanted for himself, that he came up with a plan to make himself better and stronger and faster and happier, and that he worked so hard, for so long, to see that plan through to completion. He should be proud of himself for doing the work to maintain the body that he fought so hard to earn and the overall improved health that came with it.

Anyway, if Shiro can’t stick up for himself, then Bandor at least deserves to know that there is no magical overnight solution to make himself love push-ups. He deserves to know that he doesn’t need to have been _born_ loving push-ups or sprung out of his parents’ heads, fully-formed and ready to work out as hard as he wants.

Except, right as Shiro starts to tell him so, Bandor laughs as if Shiro’s told the most amazing joke he’s ever heard. Not that it’s a _bad_ sound—Bandor’s voice is warm, and his laugh is bright just like his smile, and Shiro can’t pick out _any_ notes of malice or contempt—but it makes Shiro’s heart sink all the same. As if he’s been zapped right back to high school, Shiro catches himself feeling like he needs to run for a restroom stall so he can cry his eyes out in relative privacy. When Bandor places a delicate, slim-fingered hand on his arm, Shiro has to steel up every bit of resolve he has, all so he won’t act like some kind of crazy person and flinch away from contact that, according to Hunk, almost definitely has no ill-will behind it.

If he were Keith, then sure, flinching out of Bandor’s reach wouldn’t be crazy; it would be one of Keith’s myriad examples of sensory-processing issues and he’d have every right to jerk away. As much as Keith enjoys physical contact with _some_ people—as much as he’s a cuddle-bug for Hunk and Shiro and Allura, as much as he can handle affection from Ryou and Matt and Pidge, and as much as he’s begrudgingly come to enjoy getting hugs from Lance—he remains _finicky_ about touch. Strangers who try to touch Keith get exactly one warning and then he starts getting cranky.

Shiro, on the other hand, has no such justification for the way his skin crawls as Bandor cops a gentle feel of his bicep.

After a few moments of laughing, Bandor goes abruptly quiet, stopping dead in the middle of a breath. Vibrant, angry pink blooms up on his cheeks, and he gulps so hard that Shiro can hear it without straining, and his lips pucker like he’s sucked on fifteen lemons simultaneously. Watching Shiro, he has the resigned but wide-eyed, trembling look of a deer caught in someone’s headlights.

“Sorry, I… I’m sorry,” Bandor whispers and squeezes Shiro’s arm. “That… that wasn’t meant to be a joke?”

“…No? Was there anything funny about it?” God, that probably sounds too harsh, though—“Sorry, I’m not saying that you’re wrong or anything? But I’m sort of confused? I _wasn’t_ trying to be funny, no, but… Was there something—did I say anything that… was humorous?”

“I mean, _yes_? You really didn’t think, like…” Bandor’s cheeks flush an even darker shade as his shoulders curl in around his chest. “I don’t mean to sound rude or like I don’t believe you, Shiro? But I have watched when you and Lotor try to outdo each other for push-ups—”

“It’s not as much of a contest as we make it seem, alright? He’s one of my best friends. He has a lot of pent-up energy to vent, and he can get messy if he doesn’t make time for it once or twice a week. Competition helps him stay motivated, keeps him from getting bored before he’s really done.” Shiro quirks his shoulders and hopes that he looks more casual than not, shaking out his ponytail. “We aren’t actually fighting each other when we do that. It’s more of a game between us than whatever it’s seemed like?”

Tilting his head, Bandor blinks uncomprehendingly. “Oh no, I didn’t mean—I think it’s amazing, watching you two work out—”

Shiro can’t tell if his face heats up or not, but he watches helplessly as his reflection’s cheeks turn crimson.

“Perhaps Lotor is not in here as often as you, but he is clearly no slouch. He doesn’t seem to hold back, not ever. Especially not when you keep each other motivated. And he can get through so many push-ups at once—”

“He slacks off a lot of the time, actually. His personal best is two-hundred-fifty push-ups in ten minutes? Maybe two-sixty—”

“That’s on the same level as Navy SEALS—”

“Yeah, I know.” He quirks his shoulders, takes a swig of water, reminds himself that he can’t tell the whole story of this without Lotor’s permission. “Lotor could tell you about it, if he wants. But he doesn’t push himself about them like he used to do.”

“That’s exactly what I mean, you know?” When Shiro supposes that he has no idea, actually, something like hurt or worry flashes across Bandor’s face. “Whether or not he enjoys it, Lotor has incredible stamina. But when he stops, you can keep going. And the last time you two were in here, did you not—”

“Knock out two-hundred-ninety push-ups in ten minutes? Yeah, I did. It’s not easy, but it’s also not _my_ personal best, either—”

“Your best can _truly_ show that up? Because it was already quite an impressive feat to witness.”

“I mean, I’ve managed over three-hundred in ten minutes, but I’ve only done it a few times—”

“Yes, but you _know_ what the world record for those parameters is, don’t you?” Bandor waits for Shiro to shake his head before explaining with a grin, “The most recent record that I heard was four-hundred-and-fifty push-ups in ten minutes. With all the work that you put in? Surely, you could get there, too.”

Bandor’s face goes all starry as he says this and he squeezes Shiro’s arm again. God, it’s like he’s meeting Hugh Jackman in person instead of leaning closer Shiro, utterly enraptured for no apparent reason and making Shiro feel slightly nauseated, whether or not Bandor means for that to happen. Even worse, though, his voice seems to downright _sparkle_.

Shiro didn’t know that it was _possible_ for someone’s voice to sparkle.

Swallowing thickly, Shiro tries not to purse his lips too tightly. Tries to keep smiling as politely as he can and tries to keep himself from looking too green around the gills. No matter how much he wants to run for the locker room, he hasn’t finished his workout for the day. No matter what his brain wants him to think he’s feeling, the fact is simple: aside from his slender build and being human, Bandor is nothing like Kara and Melissa and River, the Karen Smith to their Gretchen Weiners and Regina George, respectively. He’s nothing like the two Daves or the three Heathers from their old clique. He’s nothing like Bryce, or Kyle, or Joey, or Chris, or Teena.

True, Shiro has no idea why Bandor’s watching him so intently, not once taking his eyes off of Shiro’s face. He has no idea why Bandor’s hand ghosts down to his elbow, or why Bandor drags his tongue over his lips when it’s only going to make them get chapped, or why he lights up even more when Shiro lets a flash of teeth slip into his smile. But it isn’t fair to assume that Bandor even _has_ intentions, much less that they’re untoward.

Besides, it isn’t his fault that Shiro has something wrong with him. If Bandor’s doing _anything_ deliberate, then it’s probably just that he’s curious. Because Shiro didn’t react how he expected, and it’s fair that Bandor wants to understand why. But Shiro put so much work into making himself better and it doesn’t even matter because here he is, still _broken_—

“Shiro, I…” Eyes going even wider, Bandor licks his lips again. “Did you, I mean, are—”

“I used to be fat okay?”

Shiro winces as soon as he blurts that out. When he glances around the gym, no one’s paying attention to him and Bandor. He must not have been _that_ horribly loud, then. But he wilts into a deep slouch as Bandor squeezes his elbow and blinks at him as if Shiro just proposed that there are tiny, invisible nature spirits trying to burn down the gym.

“Until recently. _Really_ recently. That’s what I mean about the whole…” Vaguely waving a hand in front of his face, Shiro heaves a sigh like vomiting his soul. “That’s why I _know_ you don’t need any kind of special knack for push-ups. If you want to get better at them, you just have to figure out where you’re starting off. Decide what your goals are going to be. Then, just work hard, keep pushing yourself, and don’t let anybody—”

“That isn’t what I wanted to ask, though?” Bandor clings more tightly to Shiro’s elbow. His cheeks go pinker than Allura’s favorite juniberry blossoms as he splutters, “What I meant… I mean, I _didn’t_ know that about you, I didn’t even guess—not that it make any difference in what I wanted to ask, because it doesn’t, it really, absolutely doesn’t—nor would it? I don’t know why it would, but I don’t want you thinking, like? I’m just? What I _wanted_ to say was, like—”

He cuts himself off with a gasp. Trying to get his breath back, Bandor whines softly. He forces himself to smile and Shiro wishes that he wouldn’t. Not because it’s a _bad_ smile on Bandor’s face, but a cold shock of guilt digs its claws into Shiro’s heart again. Jesus, Bandor’s wound up so tightly that it might be literally hurting him—and part of Shiro still wants to know when Ashton Kutcher’s going to tackle him and scream that he’s been punked.

Once Bandor’s calm again, he grins hopefully. “Do you—I mean? Would you maybe be interested? In going out to dinner with me?”

“Huh, what,” Shiro says, and immediately cringes at himself. “Oh my God, I’m sorry—Jesus, could I sound any more like the guys who…”

He trails off and wants to leave this be. But Bandor prods: “The guys who… don’t _know _if they want to go out to dinner with me?”

Shiro pinches the bridge of his nose. “More like the guys who never used to believe I was asking them out.”

“Obviously, I don’t know them? But if you hit on me in a crowded bar, I might not believe my good fortune, either. So, I understand…”

Shaking his head makes Bandor trail off, but Shiro needs a deep breath or three. “It’s not like that when you’re fat,” he says, letting his chin drop and his eyes slip shut. “Most of the time, they were just confused. Probably because fat people aren’t supposed to want sex and fat Asians are supposed to be rarer than unicorns. But I had some guys laugh at me for asking if I could buy them a drink. Or they’d let me get their drink, then tell me actually been checking Lotor out, instead of me. Some guys asked me why my _gay friend_ couldn’t have found a designated driver who had any business being in a gay bar.”

“They assumed that you were _straight_?” Bandor huffs, a mix of disbelieving and offended. “But why would they—”

“Because fat, gay Asians aren’t supposed to exist, okay?” Shiro inhales sharply, trying to steady himself so he won’t go off when Bandor doesn’t deserve that. “As far as most of the world is concerned? If you’re fat and gay, then you need to be a bear or else you’re pathetic, and sad, and it’d be better if you didn’t exist. If you’re gay and Asian, you need to be as slim, toned, and hard-masculine as possible because any extra weight or femininity means nobody will ever want to sleep with you. If you’re fat and Asian, then you’ll never hear the end of it from anybody. If you put all of that together, though?”

When he forces himself to open his eyes, Shiro can’t tell what Bandor’s tight-lipped, bemused expression is supposed to mean.

But he also can’t look at it for too long before his head starts feeling flushed and hot and flooded once again. So, he glances around the gym instead. Most of the other patrons, Shiro doesn’t recognize. Of the ones he _does_ recognize, only Nyma and Allura hold his interest. They come out of the women’s locker room together, neck-deep in whispering to each other about Lord only knows what. Shiro could swear that they look his and Bandor’s way, and he’d testify under oath that he catches Allura narrowing her eyes at him specifically.

On the other hand, though, Shiro’s apparently been wrong about pretty much every social interaction he’s had with everyone but Ryou, Keith, and Lotor lately. So, honestly, who knows? He’s probably imagining things again.

Instead of puzzling out what any of this might or might not mean, he soldiers on: “There’s no room in most people’s minds for a neurotic, stubborn, gay perfectionist who’s too much of an emotionally sensitive, dramatic, professional sports-apathetic sissy to count as truly masc. But who also isn’t sassy, swishy, or fashionable enough to count as _truly_ fem, and sure, he likes George Michael? And you could say he has divas? But he likes Emilie Autumn, Courtney Love, The Birthday Massacre, Jack Off Jill, Fiona Apple, and Chelsea Wolfe, and probably sounds pretentious when he admits that Lance and Lotor are the only reasons he knows who most of the big pop divas are at all. Then, he’s fat and Japanese-American on top of all that? You’d have better luck convincing some guys to believe in Mothman.”

Tucking his white fringe back behind his ear, Shiro smirks ruefully. Because it wouldn’t be any help to anyone, he doesn’t allow himself to point out that, when he was fat, most guys never wanted to accept that he loved sex. Not unless they were Lotor, Maurice, Adam, or one of the chasers out there who snapped at Shiro for so much as mentioning that he wanted to lose weight.

Bandor makes a few throaty, confused sounds before cutting into the silence with, “I’m sorry, but…? Who is Lance?”

“Sorry, I… He’s my brother’s boyfriend. And one of mine and Lotor’s other friends. He… doesn’t come here often.”

Understatement of the century: Lance sometimes does yoga classes when he feels like it, but he never made a real habit out of going to the gym and his New Year’s Resolution was to give it up entirely. To hear him tell it, he’s doubled down on that in the past six weeks, and it’s entirely, completely Shiro’s fault for turning into such an urecognizably skinny little bitch in California.

(Alright, Lance wouldn’t use those words, exactly. But he _wants_ to say that. Shiro can tell.)

Looking around again, Shiro can’t spot Allura. For God’s sakes, she’s slightly taller than Keith, with dark brown skin, large eyes that refuse to decide between being blue or violet or a turquoise kind of shade, billowing clouds of silvery-blonde hair that only barely let her tame them into a ponytail, and long, toned legs that would make even the most exceptionally beautiful gazelles seethe with envy. She usually work outs in cotton candy pink gym shorts that are barely big enough for her to have pocket-space, and matching tank tops that only leave anything to the imagination because she loves herself enough to wear a sports bra.

It’s not like Allura is particularly average-looking. How the Hell can Shiro misplace his friend and essentially-sister-in-law like this?

“But…” Bandor scoots closer, like he’s afraid of being ignored. “What about dinner? I meant it? When I asked?”

Processing that question takes a moment. Once Shiro’s head wraps itself around the words, he’s still left blinking back at Bandor, watching him for any signs that he’s misreading the situation, or that Bandor’s intentions are nowhere near as on-the-level as he’s claiming, or that Shiro’s sitting underneath the Sword of Damocles _and_ there’s another shoe about to drop onto him because getting impaled through the skull by a sword clearly wouldn’t be punishment enough for daring to exist as himself and no doubt with all his problems still intact.

“I actually, it’s—erm.” Shiro’s almost grateful for his head feeling so bogged down in whatever mess he’s had to deal with all day so far. At least he doesn’t need to have his face rubbed in how badly he’s embarrassing himself. “I’m… Not flattered, no, that isn’t the word I want? But I’m—I didn’t expect you to ask, or? And it’s not that you’re—you haven’t done anything wrong or whatever about that, it’s—you’ve been completely fine, and you—but I’m just—”

“Shiro?”

Hearing his name rattles Shiro into blurting out, “I already have a boyfriend. I’m sorry, I—”

“Did he…” Bandor’s face falls, but not like he’s upset about the rejection. If anything, he seems concerned—which, in turn, plants a ten-ton iceberg in the pit of Shiro’s chest. Gesturing at him, and specifically waving his hand at Shiro’s abs, Bandor says, “Did you do all this for him? Because if he didn’t appreciate—”

“No, no—God, no, it wasn’t like that at all. He’s… He’s been in my life a while, but he wasn’t even my boyfriend until last night—”

Shiro tenses as something thuds onto the mat by his other side.

Or, rather, someone.

Namely: Allura. Bandor jerks away from Shiro’s arm. He throws both of hands up in as if she’s caught them groping each other and she has any room to criticize them. Unmoved and ostensibly oblivious, Allura stretches out her legs and back as though she’s sitting entirely by herself, with no one in her vicinity. Her posture, as ever, is impeccable, and she has a level of poise and calm that Shiro can’t even dream of having for himself—not unless he wants to fake his way through life more than he already does. Whatever Allura does to get her mind so clear and rein in her emotions so well, Shiro has yet to crack the code and doesn’t want to ask.

Not least because she makes it look so easy that the mere thought of asking makes Shiro feel like an idiot. Sighing deeply, she reaches over her head and rolls out her neck while Shiro gently tries to nudge Bandor into relaxing. Or at least into putting his hands down because Allura doesn’t bite anyone who isn’t Lance or Ryou. When she finally turns her gaze to Shiro, it’s with pursed lips, a huff, and one of her perfectly manicured eyebrows arched with expectation.

“Princess,” Shiro says. “Did you bring your phone?”

“I might have done. But I also might have left it in my locker.” In the face of Shiro trying to give her an unimpressed face, Allura leans back, resting on her palms and letting him see the outline of a phone in her hip pocket. Not unexpected—she never leaves her phone in her locker—but right now, it teases Shiro more than the faux-pensive sigh Allura heaves. “You could convince me by explaining why you need it.”

“Because I know how you are about documenting everything that happens, as much as The Gang will let—”

“Lance is the one in our relationship who compulsively posts on Instagram, not me.” Allura shakes out her fluffy ponytail, but the impish grin lighting up her face suggests that she’s nowhere near as offended as she wants to seem for the sake of something like humor. “I could, however, be convinced to share some of aforementioned documentation—”

“I don’t need it for long, okay? I’d use my own but it’s in my locker, and I need to finish for the day before I head back there, so…” Fighting off the impulse to sigh, Shiro shakes his own head. His ponytail drags along the top of his spine, not sticking to his skin but more sweat-laden than Shiro tends to like. “Look, Bandor’s curious about me and Keith, and—”

“Ooooh! Yes, I believe some congratulations are in order? Keith told me all about you two—”

“I know that you have photos of us in your phone, okay? Including old ones? Like, old ones from before Lotor and I went to California?” Shiro gives her a long, silent look that makes Allura wilt, makes her pout like she thinks she might have actually hurt him. “You’re fine, Princess, I promise. We’re good. You didn’t do anything, or…” He holds out his hand. “Please, Allura? I just need a minute or two.”

Fortunately, this makes her relent, unlock her phone, and hand the thing over.

Double fortunately, she keeps her phone so organized that Shiro doesn’t even need to dig through her favorites. Aside from having some groupings in her phone’s library set aside for specific events or important dates, she has meticulously labeled individual folders for solo shots of their friends and photos of them in different arrangements. _“Me & Keith,” “Keith & Lance,” “Shiro & Lotor,” “Shiro & Ryou,” “Lance & Ryou,” “Me & Zethrid,” “Me & Ryou,” “Me & Lance,” “Me & Pidge,” “Hunk & Lance,” “Pidge & Matt,” “Pidge & Hunk,” “Pidge & Nyma,” “Acxa & Lotor,” “Hunk & Shiro & Keith,” “Acxa & Zethrid,” “Zethrid & Keith,” “Hunk & Lance & Keith & Pidge,” “Keith & Lotor”_—and still so many more on top of those. Allura has everybody lined up and filed away like she’s trying to win an award for cataloguing her memories so systematically.

Although Shiro furrows his brow at her for this, he’s unspeakably grateful when he finally finds the folder labeled, _“Keith & Shiro.”_

The first photo that he pulls up, unfortunately but not unpredictably, is a fairly recent one. Last week, Allura, Ryou, and Lance all talked Keith into having a group dinner at Ryou’s favorite sushi place, a few towns over. Keith, in turn, talked Shiro into coming with him. More accurately, he conveyed the triad’s wish that Shiro would make the time and join them for this, even though no restaurant, however good its fare is, will ever live up to Ojiisan’s standards. Unbeknownst to Shiro at the time, Allura captured a shot of him lifting a pair of chopsticks and putting a spider roll into Keith’s mouth.

Beside him, Bandor coos so warmly and so intently that Shiro can hear the smile in his voice. “You two look quite happy together. And it’s obvious that you’re besotted. Though, is it a trick of the lighting, or is your boyfriend rather… erm?”

“Yeah, Keith’s kind of chubby. But he likes it that way. And he understands that I didn’t like my own body with—”

“I beg your pardon?” Allura balks, not judgmentally but openly gawking like she can’t believe what she’s hearing Shiro admit.

He quirks his shoulders as if playing things as casually as possible will actually make her drop the subject. “I was telling Bandor that I used to be a pretty big guy. So, he’s probably confused by the fact that Keith prefers having love-handles.”

Bandor nods without saying anything, and with Allura’s permission, Shiro goes back to flicking through the photos for him. Each one gets a similarly enthused reaction, as if Bandor is more excited by the prospect of Shiro and Keith being in love with each other than he was by the thought of Shiro possibly accepting his offer of a date. Even when they get back far enough to find the photos from before California, Bandor keeps sighing wistfully, like these pictures are the cutest things he’s seen in ages. Whenever Shiro glances at him, Bandor’s smiling beatifically. Whenever he speaks up, it’s to say something about how Shiro seems so unguarded about letting Keith muss up old undercut, or how Keith looks so happy to have been with Shiro even if they weren’t boyfriends in any of these photos, or how they fit together so well and the pictures make it obvious.

None of which can be trusted, not really. Even if Bandor has no conscious ill will over this rejection—even if he’s so kind and wouldn’t do anything as bad as Shiro’s mind can imagine—_something_ will go wrong and knock Shiro down again in short order because it _has_ to. Because that’s the way things always go. Right when someone least expects it, right when they think that they’re happy and out of their own personal woods, something comes along to ruin that and everything goes wrong. By the time Shiro returns Allura’s phone, he’s ready for an entire warehouse full of other shoes to drop out of the ceiling and bury him in comeuppance. That _must_ be what’s coming to him, after all of this ostensible happiness.

Instead, Bandor scoots back onto his own mat and gives Shiro a sheepish smile.

“I won’t say that I’m not disappointed,” he admits. “Because I _was_ quite serious about my request—”

“Hey, I’m sorry—I mean, you didn’t know, and I _was_ single until last night—”

“It’s fine, Shiro. I didn’t openly ask you out sooner, which is no one’s fault but mine.” Words like these, in Shiro’s experience, should be teeming with passive-aggressive venom. Except they aren’t, and Bandor beams at Shiro like he means it while saying, “I’m happy for you. Your Keith is a lucky guy.”

“I’m the lucky one out of the two of us, actually.” Ducking his chin, Shiro scratches at the back of his neck. Through the haze swamping and murking back into his skull, he can’t feel if his face is heating up, but it wouldn’t surprise him. “And again, it’s nothing that you did, you’re… You’re sweet, okay? There’s someone out there for you, too. Or someones, maybe. I mean, my brother and Allura and Lance are all together, so if you’re polyamorous or anything? Other polyamorous people are out there…”

All of which makes Bandor grin so hopefully, Shiro almost feels some of it, himself.

He leaves out the part of the story where he didn’t believe that Keith would ever love him back. As he stretches out and puts his earbuds back in, he doesn’t mention the fact that Keith had to go full Han Solo and meet an, _“I love you”_ with an, _“I know” _before Shiro let himself seriously consider the idea that Keith might have been in love with him this entire time. Clipping the mp3 player to his shirt, taking deep, slow breaths to the opening strains of Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” and trying to focus on getting into proper position for his push-ups, Shiro pushes all of that as far back into his mind as possible.

For one thing, those facts and feelings help approximately no one, at the moment, so there isn’t any point in sharing them. For the most part, though, Shiro’s head is swimming in a heat that will not let him shake it off on his own. Clearly, he’s sat still for too long and his body’s decided to register a complaint. His restlessness is attacking his brain by making him feel almost like he has a fever—unlikely, with how infrequently he gets sick, how rarely he gets a fever when he does fall ill, and how long it’s been since he hacked up red azaleas—and Shiro needs to fix it.

Vaguely, Shiro wonders if that explanation would make logical sense to anyone but himself. Starting his first set of reps, he wonders if the science would check out enough for an episode _Grey’s Anatomy_, much less the real world. But this story is all he has to go on, at the moment, so he’s sticking to it. Obviously, if he wants any mental clarity for the rest of the day, then he needs to get those endorphins pumping once again.

* * *

Blessedly, getting through all his push-ups seems to work Shiro into the chilled out, placid mindset that he wanted.

This, in his experience, is the magic of push-ups. With all their myriad variations, they’re repetitive and so easy for him to slip into and get swept up by. So easy for Shiro to focus on to the exclusion of everything else around him, especially the feelings that he cannot parse through at any given time, all so that his head can clear up already and get back to whatever keel Shiro passes off as vaguely _normal_. So easy to shut up and enjoy, not least because more than anything else he’s learned to do in the past nearly-two years? Push-ups make him _get it _for himself, not in an abstract, intellectual way, but in a way that Shiro _feels_.

On a level so deep and visceral that he doesn’t have words for it, push-ups have helped him understand what Elle Woods meant by, _“Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands. They just don’t.”_

Basic ones, pseudo-planches with his hands pointed backward, the “diamond” push-ups where he puts his hands together and underneath the center of his chest. Reps with a resistance band, and reps one leg lifted, alternating between them for each set. The so-called explosive push-ups that Keith’s come to love so much, even if no one else in Shiro’s life agrees about how cool it is that he can push himself up so hard, he has enough time to clap his hands before he hits the floor. Push-ups with a weighted vest adding eighty extra pounds for Shiro to lift (three sets of which get mixed with a resistance band until, right in the middle of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” Allura arches an eyebrow with an air like, _“Knock it off right now or so help me, Shiro? I will tattle to your brother like we’re all back in kindergarten.”_

Superman push-ups, where his arms stretch out ahead of him and let him do more work on his abs and back. Rocky push-ups, where he “explodes” off the ground and switches his landing hand in mid-air, allegedly just like Sylvester Stallone in that boxing movie that Shiro’s never seen and doesn’t want to. Spider-Man push-ups, where he channels his inner Peter Parker and curls one leg up toward his elbow as he gets closer to the floor. Jackknife push-ups, where he bounces off the floor and into a toe-touch, then jumps out and goes right back through the basic motions. No question, this looks utterly ridiculous while it’s in process but Shiro can’t argue with the results spelled out all up and down his abs.

(He doesn’t think that Keith could argue with them, either. Oh God, he hopes Keith wouldn’t…)

Yes, Shiro should probably try to do a better job of counting reps and sets, rather than zoning out to his music and letting himself zero in on his form, the motions that go into each exercise, the way he breathes and pulls his stomach back tight even when he isn’t focused on his abs, and how his body wakes up and really feels alive as he lets himself get lost in the rush, and the burn, and the ineffable, meditative calm of repeatedly pushing off the floor and lowering himself to it again.

Granted, all of this goes better and more smoothly when he doesn’t keep looking over to his left and finding that Allura’s watching him like she’s looking for God only knows what. Considering his history, how everyone in The Gang knows varying amounts of information about it, and the part where she’s been romantically entangled with his brother for three-and-a-half years? Allura snooping would surprise Shiro about as much as that breaking news about Pope Francis secretly being Catholic. Wouldn’t kill anyone to let Shiro go without sticking him underneath a microscope—nor would it kill them to let him work out without doing anything that impedes his ability to enjoy it—but the best he’s going to get about this is, _“Let’s agree to disagree.”_

Yet, for as tedious as the blatant spying makes things, Shiro has his tunes and his push-ups and the way they make him feel. For her part, Allura has her own workout routine to get through and she won’t skimp on that just to spy on Shiro; she’s too dedicated. She respects him enough to skip the condescension of pretending that she isn’t spying on him, too. Which doesn’t take the edge off of the fact that she’s definitely spying on him, but at least he doesn’t need to sort his way through questions of whether he’s noticing something real or simply being far too sensitive.

Besides, the situation could be so much worse. Trying to tune Allura out makes Shiro feel like something cold and slick and guilty’s filling up his chest cavity, but he keeps going, no matter how much stopping would quell her disappointment, and the burn of pushing himself feels like the world’s best reward.

Ignoring her as much as he can manage makes his lungs writhes like they’re trying not to let someone stab them with a fork, but Shiro keeps his breathing deep, and slow, and even—all exactly as he’s supposed to do while working out or trying to keep himself calm. No muss, no fuss, no coconuts. Better than that: no Xanax necessary (which is a good thing, since it’s back in Shiro’s locker).

Pretending he’s off in his own workout world means that Shiro gets reminded of how he isn’t any time Allura clears her throat too loudly or unwittingly shifts her mat to close toward his own, but he has the satisfaction of knowing that he increasingly feels like death marinated in grimy swamp water and warmed up in a malfunctioning, filthy, backwoods truck stop microwave and he banged out a good, solid workout anyway. Which _is _an accomplishment, even if Allura and the rest of the world disagrees.

If not for Shiro steeling up as much resolve as possible, the squiffy feelings could undo every silver lining that he digs up for himself. As Shiro gets closer to calling it a day, a weird headache starts nagging at him and he rather feels like someone wants to drown him on dry land—but during his ten-minute timed set, Shiro knocks out two-hundred-and-seventy-five push-ups so easily, he almost doesn’t feel like he’s stitching up a shattered family heirloom vase with Elmer’s Glue and scotch tape.

Unfortunately, pushing through does absolutely nothing about Allura. She keeps her eyes to herself for a while, but soon enough, he feels her glaring all the way through Hole’s “Celebrity Skin.” Whatever she’s thinking and whatever she plans on doing with it, there’s no question about the fact that she’s watching him like Shiro’s her own live-action, up close and personal Asian Steve Rogers.

By the time he finishes a second ten-minute stint (banging out two-hundred-and-eighty-five push-ups) and shifts into sitting on his mat, Shiro’s not certain that he blames her for watching him so closely. As he shoves his sweaty, sticky bangs off his forehead, Shiro feels like he could be sick. Swallowing thickly, he wrinkles his nose at his reflection and grimaces at how wan he looks. Pallid. Like something’s trying to drain the color out of his entire body because it won’t be satisfied with simply taking the color from his cheeks. It takes several deep breaths to will himself up to his feet, and once he gets there, he wishes that he hadn’t bothered.

Hearing Allura murmur his name, he winces—not from her voice, but from the thought of trying to respond. The fluorescent lights don’t help matters any; a quick glance up at them makes Shiro’s stomach lurch and his pulse rattle around inside his skull like some godforsaken poltergeist. He chokes down a sigh, tries to ignore the feeling of something pricking at the back of his throat because, in all likelihood, it means less than nothing. Carding his hand over his hair, he mumbles something that he doesn’t entirely believe about how he’s completely fine but he’s going to turn in without doing his handstand push-ups anyway, lest he manage to make himself _stop_ feeling completely fine.

“Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, Shiro? But you have become quite attached to your handstand push-ups.” How can Allura make it so obvious that she’s narrowing her eyes in disapproval? All she’s using right now is her voice. “So, I find myself inclined to wonder—”

“I feel fine, okay?” God, would it kill his legs to _not_ wobble beneath him like they might give out? To _not_ make crouching down for his water bottle feel like it’s going to end in him crashing to the floor? Shiro isn’t asking for a lot, here—but in the meantime, he forces a smile at Allura. “I just… need a shower. And to call it quits for the day. I… I think I’ve done enough.”

Unpocketing her phone, she sniffs as though she doesn’t quite believe him. Which makes sense because, in all due fairness, she _shouldn’t_ believe most of the words coming out of Shiro’s mouth right now. Sure, he’s told bigger lies than this and told them less convincingly. But he’s saying that he’s fine when everything about him—from his pallor to his trembling jaw, from his tight voice to his straining legs—practically screams to the world that he is in a completely different galaxy from being _fine._

Regardless of what Allura believes or doesn’t, Shiro skulks back to the locker rooms and drags himself through a cold shower. Drying off and putting on clean underwear, he still feels like he might vomit at any second. Wrapping his hair up in a towel, he wonders if he’ll make it back to his locker or if he’ll pass out on the way. He left his phone in there again, same as the shirt he meant to bring, so he’d find himself rather out of luck if he fainted.

Yet, in spite of his fears, he keeps walking. One foot goes in front of the other, then again, and again, and again, and even if he doesn’t feel _better_ in any practically significant way? Even if his head still feels like it’s mired in heat, like the inside of his skull has gotten more humid than a bayou in July, and and like he’s lucky that his brain isn’t boiling? Even if the _thwap! thwap! thwap! _of his sandals on the tiles sounds like gunfire and makes him cringe? At least he feels clean, which doesn’t weaving his fraying nerves back together any but it soothes things more or less enough for now.

Dimly, Shiro wonders if he might meet Lotor at the coffee-shop without any further incidents. Then, he rounds a corner to find Ryou leaning against someone else’s locker, pointedly staring at Shiro over his glasses.

“So,” he drawls, “you were working yourself to the point of physical illness.”

Slouching, Shiro rolls his eyes. “I almost finished everything I planned on doing. But I felt sick and _stopped_.”

“Are you trying to impress someone by flashing your abs like this?”

“No. Feeling sick made me get… y’know, like?” As he plods toward his locker, Shiro waves a hand around by his head. “Brain-fuzzy. I forgot to bring a shirt with me to the shower. I’m just glad that I had underwear with my shower stuff.”

“Alright. Well, let me see if I’ve got the story right here—”

“Not for nothing? But you sound like you’ve already decided that you do—”

“Humor me for a minute, Kashi. You finally got together with Keith—congratulations, by the way; took you two more than long enough—and one of his clients commissioned the two of you to have anal sex on camera. Then, you went to breakfast with him and Lotor, and you and Keith split a strawberry milkshake.” With a pensive hum, he pushes his glasses up. “And your first response to all of this… was to come work out?”

Pawing through his gym bag, Shiro shakes his head but doesn’t let himself sigh. Whatever’s going wrong with his body today, his lungs feel impossibly heavy, like he’s got two black holes inside of his chest. Sighing might only make things worse, no matter how much he wants to do that. On the plus, he has good options for shirts. Shiro needs to sniff some of them, and sadly, not all of them are clean. So, he might need to push doing the laundry up by a couple days, if he can get through Ryou’s attempt at confrontation without losing consciousness.

“I was planning to come here before anything that you said happened,” he says, choosing a hot pink t-shirt with _This Boy Is A Bottom_ emblazoned on the chest in black block letters. “Keith and Lotor _know_ that I was planning this, so whatever Allura told you? Try talking to them instead.”

A deep breath from Ryou, and a pensive hum. “I might have been misled about this situation. By _both_ of my significant others.”

“In fairness, I doubt it was intentional. Lance isn’t here, and depending on what Lotor told him? He could’ve misconstrued things.”

“Allura _is_ here, though. She’s the one who made it sound like you were working yourself sick.”

“She and Nyma got here after I did. She wouldn’t have known how long I was working out, since she didn’t ask.” Pulling his jeans on, Shiro quirks his shoulders. “Anyway, Allura was worried. And between how I look, how I feel, and my long list of prior offenses? I can’t really blame her.”

Taking advantage of Ryou’s contemplative silence, Shiro stretches out his back and arms and neck. Objectively, this fixes nothing and not letting himself sigh makes something inside him prickle like an emotionally sensitive hedgehog. But it feels nice, like a bit of release before he tosses his towel into the basket with everyone else’s dirty towels. Unsure what he wants to do now, Shiro grabs up a tube of toothpaste and the spare brush he keeps in his bag. Scouring his mouth probably won’t help, either—but problems always feel so much less unwieldy when he has clean hair and a freshly scrubbed mouth.

Slouching against the sink beside Shiro, Ryou folds his arms over his chest. Although he peers at Shiro like a kitten who could stand to be less curious, he waits for Shiro to spit up before prodding him with, “You’re being unusually blasé about this situation.”

“Not really.” Once he’s done a quick rinse, he explains, “I have a splitting headache. I can’t tell if I feel tired or keyed up. I’ve been overly sensitive to light all morning. And I’m mentally preparing for the game of telephone that The Gang will get up to if this nausea cuts the inane foreplay and makes me sick up already. Because, like you said, I split a strawberry milkshake with Keith and enjoyed it as much as I could, given how I feel like crap.”

“So, because you’re _you_—which is to say: high-strung and incredible prone to catastrophizing things—you’re getting ready for the entire Gang to decide that you’re officially bulimic if you should throw up at any point in the next twenty-four hours.” Ryou’s face falls sympathetically when Shiro nods. “Well, I think your worries are mostly unfounded—”

Shiro barks out an incredulous laugh. Mussing his fingers through damp clumps of hair, he openly rolls his eyes.

“I _also_ think that you’re being a bit harsh—”

“Yeah, your boyfriend and Pidge decided that I’m not myself anymore because I have abs now, but _I’m_ the one who’s being—”

“But _I’m sorry_, Kashi.” Ryou’s eyes flash with an unspoken dare: _Interrupt me one more time, brother, and so help me…_ Nudging his glasses back up, he says, “I’m sorry for whatever’s going on to make you feel so anxious. And for whatever the rest of us are doing that feels like an attack on you.”

_Well, great_, Shiro keeps to himself. _Now, I just feel like a jerk._

Sighing heavily, Shiro digs hard at a knot in his shoulder. “My point is: if I’m blasé? That’s because my workout didn’t clear my head like I wanted. It’s taking superhuman effort to stay standing. And I cannot deal with a fight right now.”

“Of course. Which is why you’re apparently bottling up another rant about Lance and Pidge.”

“I can’t handle fighting with you. Doesn’t mean I’m not frustrated with them.” Or that he doesn’t find his reflection… concerning. The Shiro blinking back at him looks even paler than he did out in the gym. His lips tremble, and his limp, dank hair gives him the withered, slack appearance of a drowned rat. Putting another line of toothpaste on his brush, Shiro adds, “And I still stopped when I felt too sick to keep going.”

Ryou hugs himself more tightly, but gives Shiro a nod. “For what it’s worth? I’m happy that you did. And proud of you for coming back here instead of beating yourself up for not finishing. Don’t blame you for the stress you’re feeling, though. Also, I can’t say I was fully prepared for how you look naked—”

Shiro spits up more loudly than necessary. “What about how I look naked?”

Good thing Ryou needs to think about that answer. Because Shiro stopped mid-brushing and his nerves scream that he needs to finish.

“It’s not necessarily bad, Kashi? At least I’m not set on what I think, yet.” Ryou hums like he’s still thinking, making up his answer as he goes and hoping for the best. “Clearly, you put in hard work to get here. You like the results and they speak for themselves. And I _do_ respect that you worked for this because if I cared like you did or wanted to lose weight? If I had some pressing, health-related reason for it, like you did? I probably would’ve taken one of the many options that you didn’t seriously consider because you inaccurately thought they were _easier_.”

Spitting up leads into huffing. “Try telling that joke to Lotor—”

“The fact that you _thought _about surgical options doesn’t mean you seriously—”

“Also, can we please get to the _but_? You’re obviously building to it—”

“_But_.” Ryou lets his shoulders droop. “Do you know how much body fat you actually have? Because it doesn’t look like all that much.”

“Seven-and-a-half percent of two-hundred-fifteen.” Wiping at his mouth with paper towel, Shiro swallows a sigh and makes himself look Ryou in the eye. “I’m not gonna try to do the math right now. But that’s the number I remember. And Dr. Carter said it was fine.”

“I sure hope she told you more than just, ‘It’s fine.’”

“She _said_ that I’m at around where a lot of athletes are. She _said_ that the national average for cis guys around our age? Is about fifteen percent body fat.” Shiro wilts under the half-hearted glare that Ryou gives him, even though it’s nowhere near his brother’s best. “For the record? I had almost three times that when I started losing weight, okay? More than forty-two percent. _Almost_ forty-three. So, I’m at—”

“That’s impressive, but not really what I’m…” Groaning into his palm, Ryou pinches the bridge of his nose. “Look, I can only explain my position about this issue by sharing something that Lance is very sensitive about. And you are **_not_** allowed to repeat a word of it. Not even to Keith—Hell, _especially_ not Keith, right now. Ulaz is only safe because he has confidentiality rules in place. Do I make myself clear, Kashi-_niichan_?”

Shiro holds up his right hand. “I solemnly swear that I won’t tell anyone about this, not even Keith.”

The omission of Lotor sticks out a bit, but as Shiro takes a deep breath, a chill shocks through his chest. Heat floods over his head and down his face, down his neck. He barely restrains himself from wincing as he glances at the fluorescent lights. The moan he chokes down claws at his throat like it’s trying to rip its way out. Worse, he would swear that someone’s gotten deep inside of him and started hacking his lungs up with a chainsaw and some razor-blades. About the only reason he forces himself not to double over and cling for dear life to the sink? Is that he wants Ryou to keep talking; he wants to hear what his brother has to say.

Still, this pain is ridiculous. God, it’s like his body doesn’t want to give him a chance to read too much into things. Like his unconscious mind refuses to let him dwell on what it means that Ryou isn’t explicitly forbidding him from discussing this with Lotor. (All things considered, it probably means nothing or as close to nothing as _something_ can ever get. But then again, what if there _is_ a hidden meaning and Shiro’s missing out?)

“Last time Lance checked with his primary care doctor? He only had about _seven_ percent body fat.” Over his glasses, Ryou stares at Shiro with _Great, Pointed Significance_. Like he’s watching for any sign that Shiro doesn’t understand what’s being said. “So, you have only slightly more body fat than a guy who is incredibly skinny. And who, because of this, gets sick once or twice a month, and easily gets so cold that he sometimes wears heavy sweatshirts in mid-July.”

Trying to roll his eyes wracks Shiro’s body with another groan. He bites it back, but still, it’s clear that he needs to try something new.

“Concern noted. And deserved. And I promise, I’m not trying to get out of hearing it, but?” He pouts. “Feel my forehead for me? Please?”

Ryou’s fingers feel so cold, Shiro wants to flinch away.

Yet, Ryou shrugs and shakes his head bemusedly. “Seems normal to me? Not that warm.”

“Okay, well, that’s weird. I mean, it’s been long enough since my shower—”

“You took a _cold_ shower? After a strawberry milkshake? Have you completely—”

“Only _after_ I cleaned up in a warm shower—”

“I still want to point out: _cold shower_. It’s the middle of February, and you just had a milk—”

“I felt _hot_. It had nothing to do with the milkshake. Or with my weight. Or calories. Or anything—”

He cuts himself off, inhaling sharply. Pain jolts through his lungs, his chest. His entire body cringes. Teeth grit together. Stomach pulls itself taut as if trying to escape an unwanted touch. Shoulders tense like he’s done a few too many pull-ups. Jesus, Shiro wishes that he had the energy to glare at Ryou.

He also wishes that he didn’t feel like the entire world’s wobbling around him. He wishes that bracing himself on the sink would help him any. That clenching his hands around the smooth, cold porcelain would make him feel less like he’s stuck in the world’s most sadistic Gravitron at a carnival hell-bent on killing him.

“I know what my history says,” he bites out. “But I only took a cold shower because I felt hotter than I should have—”

“Sounds plausible. But so did most of your old excuses for basically everything—”

“Call Lotor, if you don’t believe me. He suggested it when I got back from my run.” A sigh bursts out of Shiro at Ryou’s incredulous huffing. He flinches as. He can’t hold back a groan. His arms shake like they’re trying to hold up against a category 5 hurricane. “Look, if I’d done what you’re thinking, would I be _telling you_ about it? Based on my precedent, would I admit to it?”

“Absolutely not. But riddle me this: how long did you spend working out today—”

“_No_. I didn’t do that. Think: I did sit-ups, push-ups, squats, and a few rounds on the rower—”

“Fine, but that isn’t what I asked. If you spent too long on those exercises—”

“Would any of them make my chest freeze over while my head feels like a sauna?” Grimacing through the best smile he can fake—clinging harder at the sink and feeling like he’s bound to split his lips wide open—Shiro tries to look Ryou in the eye. But a gasp knocks him off-kilter and he ends up staring at his brother’s double-chin. “I’ve _never_ felt like this at the gym, okay? I’ve had shortness of breath, tachycardia, panic attack levels of tightness in my chest, and burn in muscles that I didn’t know I had. But nothing like this.”

Eyes wide and lips tight, Ryou nods. His hand is gentle on Shiro’s shoulder. “Did you drive here? Or did you bum a ride?”

“Car’s in the Cherrywood lot.” As Ryou gives him a squeeze, Shiro coughs. “Keith and Lotor—”

“Are perfectly capable of handling themselves. They’ll be fine without you for an afternoon—”

“No, I drove them here. Keith’s at work. Lotor’s waiting for me at La-Sai’s. We have to—”

“_You_ have to rest. I’m not ruling out dragging you to the emergency room—”

“That’s fair. I mean, I don’t exactly—” Coughing hits him again. Several of them, all at once, each one deeper than the last.

As Shiro buries his mouth in the crook of his elbow, Ryou hangs on to his shoulder. It’s probably a miracle, the way he doesn’t let up, even as the coughing makes Shiro’s entire body tremble. The racket he’s making echoes off the walls and ceiling, loud enough that Shiro winces. If he’d just pass out already, that would be so much better than this. It’s like someone’s trying to scoop his lungs out of him like ice cream. Like his veins want to claw their way up out of him, escaping through his throat. Ryou keeps him on his feet, but Shiro’s eyes sting, then water. Tears spill out as he’s gasping for a breath.

Then, the coughs stop as suddenly as they started. Shiro gets one deep breath. And then another.

“Unless you can give me five good reasons why this isn’t necessary?” Ryou squeezes Shiro’s shoulder almost tightly enough to hurt. His stare feels like Shiro’s getting holes bored into his skull. “I’m throwing you over my shoulder and taking you to the emergency room.”

“Reason one: you couldn’t lift me up like that—”

“Try me, Twiggy. I’m young, strong, and sufficiently motivated—”

“Second reason: I _do _**_not_** disagree with you.” Saying so out loud makes Shiro’s head spin and his stomach lurch. He doesn’t bother trying to force a smile. “Look, is Allura still around? Keith’s at work, can she take him the car keys? And let him and Lotor know what’s up?”

“Of course,” Ryou whispers. Which would be more comforting if he didn’t look like he’d just seen a ghost. “Thank you, Kashi—”

“Please don’t. Just… Let me have a second, then we can go?”

Nodding, Ryou brushes the backs of his fingers up and down Shiro’s bicep. “If I ask how you’re feeling, are you going to use agreeing with me about the emergency room as a free excuse to be dismissive? Or get snarky with me about how the obvious answer is, ‘Pretty bad’?”

Braced on the sink again, Shiro shakes his head. He opens his mouth, ready to give Ryou an honest, serious answer.

But all it takes is one inhale, and the coughing stampedes over him again. Shiro’s abs and shoulders go so tight, he can’t help wincing. Which unfortunately doesn’t make the hacking let up any. More tears slop down his cheeks. Tremors wrack his chest, his back, his arms and legs. It’s worse than when he started working out in earnest. When he couldn’t get through a single push-up without agony, and gasps, and shaking. A sob claws at the inside of his Adam’s apple. It busts out as he’s trying to breathe between coughs. He can’t get any decent breath. Not between the coughing and the crying. Not with the feeling like straight-razors goring his lungs.

The coughs subside and Ryou reaches for his shoulder. But Shiro’s knees buckle. Jerk him toward the floor. He drops his arms onto the edge of the sink, doesn’t let his knees completely fall. Even though he’s breathing fine, it hurts. His head won’t stop spinning. He hears Ryou’s voice but can’t tell what he’s saying. The way that Shiro’s shivering, he’s only keeping himself up by the grace of God. Maybe he’d be on the floor if he hadn’t built up his muscles, if he hadn’t put so much work into his back and arms and core—

Another round of sick cat hacking. This time, it goes deep enough to dredge up Shiro’s soul. Each cough is cold, and wet, and drags its heels on the way out. Letting him breathe only makes the pain go that much harder. Everything goes cold and yet, it burns. Like frostbite. This might never stop. Not unless it kills him. Which would be ideal karmic comeuppance for waiting so long to tell Keith how he feels, but _dammit_, Shiro is not ready to die. Not now. Not like this.

When the coughing finally dies down, Shiro rests his forehead on his arms. Sighing doesn’t hurt, but it makes him wilt like a marionette without its strings. Ryou’s hand rubs gentle circles around the top of his spine.

Which would make Shiro feel better, if not for the exasperated groan that immediately tags along. The way that Ryou grumbles makes his words largely unintelligible, but the intent behind them comes through: as always, Ryou loves his big brother more than anyone but he’s tiring of whatever antics he thinks his Kashi’s getting up to—which is quite a garbage response to this situation. Not least since Shiro just collapsed and couldn’t really breathe.

Biting out, _“What gives?” _doesn’t earn Shiro any answers. Just a bit more wordless grousing.

“I didn’t _intentionally_ delay going to the ER,” he points out.

Ryou sniffs. “I’ve revised my opinion on whether or not you need to go—”

“It was your idea. I agreed with you—”

“Yes, but at this point, it seems kind of gratuitous—”

“How do you know? I almost passed out, Ryou. I could be _dying_—”

“You think you’re dying every time Keith smiles. You have for longer than I can remember.”

“But I could be _right_, this time, though—”

“Dragging you to the ER seems like unnecessary humiliation that I’d rather not subject you to.” Ryou waits, probably for a witty retort. When he doesn’t get one, he sighs and the roll of his eyes is clearly audible. “Stop being a drama queen for five seconds and look in the sink.”

Holding back on anything he could say, Shiro lifts his head and gazes long into a white porcelain abyss.

The abyss stares back at him, unmoving and halfway full of red azalea petals. Groaning, Shiro counts ten fully-formed blossoms.

As he thumps his forehead against his arms, Ryou pats his shoulder. “I know, right,” he deadpans. “Only you would go from zero to full-on, trashy bodice ripper protagonist for your first ever Hanahaki flare-up. Truly, your dramatic inclinations know no bounds.”

“And ‘m dating Keith already,” Shiro mumbles, deciding to just… not mention that this isn’t his first ever flare-up. More important cats to skin, right now. “Being together with him sorta makes this… y’know? I _get_ that he loves me, so it’s all like, _why_?”

“Eh. Lance gets periodic flare-ups when he’s feeling insecure. I don’t think it’s that unheard of.”

“Can you just take me home, please?” Shiro rests his cheek on his arms and tries not to look completely pathetic. “And CVS, on the way?”

“If you hadn’t asked, I would’ve taken you there anyway.” Patting Shiro’s shoulder, Ryou sighs. “You _are_ going to take it easy once I get you home, right? Because… Okay, Hanahaki isn’t lethal or worth a visit to the ER. But that sounded pretty bad? And kinda like it messed you up?”

“I solemnly—” Shiro stops short as a driving, uptempo symphonic rock song rises up from over by his locker. “God, that’s Lotor. Can you—”

He doesn’t even need to finish the sentence. Ryou darts off and catches the phone just in time. He doesn’t explain the situation in the terms that Shiro would’ve used, but he does well enough at hitting the high point about Shiro hacking up enough azaleas that it’s probably a miracle he didn’t choke. There probably aren’t too many ways to screw that up. Anyway, Shiro’s forced himself back to his feet by the time that Ryou gets back to him.

“Where are you right now,” Lotor says as soon as Ryou hands over the phone.

“Slouched on a sink in the locker room?” Shiro tucks his still-damp hair behind his ear. “Sorry, I know we had plans—”

“_Darling_, please. I’m packing up my things. Where did Ryou park?”

“In the gym’s lot, he says?”

“I shall be there directly—”

“Lotor… Barbie, please. You don’t need to—”

“Don’t need to what, exactly, Shiro? Don’t need to come with you? Don’t need to ensure that my male best friend and creative partner—who is, you’ll remember, one of the first and few people in my life to show me genuine kindness—has someone with him while he’s ill? Don’t need to look after someone for whom I care a great deal? I disagree.” Lotor sniffs, and Shiro can’t tell if he’s genuinely offended or if he’s affecting that for the sake of something vaguely like humor. “If you will adamantly refuse to let me love you, then you may pretend that I’m being purely selfish. After all, I hardly want to actualize our cinematic vision without you, and I do still have brownies to collect at your place.”

“I love you too,” Shiro mutters. “Look, I’m gonna go stretch out in Ryou’s backseat—”

“How fortunate for you that your brother’s car has enough space for that—”

“I’ll see you soon, okay? And just…” With a sigh, he pushes off the sink. “Thank you, Lotor.”

“Anytime, darling,” Lotor says, gently and audibly smiling. “Now, take care until I arrive or I will be incredibly cross with you.”

* * *

“How long does it take for a Hanahaki flare-up to go away?”

This question gets a Netflix sitcom paused and earns Shiro a cold, tight-lipped glare. Curled up in his fleece _Star Trek_ blanket, he squirms around his bed. He watches his laptop’s screen as if he can make the digital images of Clea Duvall and Laverne Cox start moving again through sheer force of will. This episode of _Blooming Beautiful _is a good one. Clea’s lovelorn, Hanahaki-stricken history teacher is chaperoning the high school’s spring fling dance with Laverne, the English teacher she’s in love with. They’re debating which students are most likely to illicitly slip alcohol in the punch bowl, and Clea’s fumbling through flirting again—

—Or that would be happening, if Lotor weren’t closing Shiro’s laptop and setting it aside.

“Explain?” When Shiro groans, Lotor huffs as if it’s taking unspeakable effort for him not to mock Shiro outright. “I cannot accurately answer your question if I do not fully understand what it _is_, darling. And considering that your poor brother thought this was the _first_ time you’ve coughed up flowers, I have several questions of my own. For example: how long has it been since you—”

“It’s been weeks, okay?” Rolling onto his back, Shiro lets his eyes slip shut. “Because I was taking the usual meds, like I was supposed to. I stopped coughing and I thought it was over. But then this goes and happens, and I’m like, ‘Well, okay, then, maybe I misjudged the situation, but I don’t know, maybe I should ask Lotor before I choke on my own lungs again.’”

“That sounds… distinctly abnormal, darling—”

“Because of course it does, right? Like Keith said: none of us would know normal if it swooped in and bit us.”

“I sincerely doubt that the anthropomorphic incarnation of normalcy would appreciate the joys of biting during sex.”

“Well, we can’t all leave hickeys like a beautiful, gay vampire who prefers men of ample size—”

“You are adorable, as ever. But what I mean, Shiro…” Lotor sighs heavily. When Shiro looks at him, he has one arm folded over his chest while the other hand kneads at his temple. “In this case? ‘Normal’ refers to what is typical of Hanahaki cases, as far as I know.”

“That’s great,” Shiro says off-handedly. “I’m a six-foot-four Japanese-American filmmaker with multiple professionally diagnosed, glaring mental health problems, and gayer than a unicorn that pukes rainbows and exclusively romances other boy unicorns. I mostly end up using my skills behind a camera to help my best friend-turned-boyfriend shoot amateur porn. I used to be fat, I know how miserable people can make you over your weight, and last night, I still got hard while insulting Keith up one side and down the other about being fat. I have panic attacks and a _Star Trek_ tramp stamp, and a guy who I thought was getting creepy and probably wanted to jerk me around? Turns out he only wanted to ask me to dinner. Genuinely. And now, I have abnormal Hanahaki symptoms. Because I can’t even get our ridiculous flower-hacking disease right.”

Cuddling his stuffed black lion to his chest, Shiro allows himself a sigh. “I just… Will literally anything about me _ever_ be normal, Barbie?”

“Not with that attitude, I suppose.” Lotor’s foot bobs idly and he tips his head back. “Although, I must confess: after nearly ten years together, I still have absolutely no idea why you _care_ so much about whether or not you fit anyone else’s arbitrary definition of normalcy.”

“Human beings are social animals. We create groups with which to identify ourselves. Wanting to be part of the group is—”

“Normal people never questioned my Father because they knew that he bankrolls several prominent senators and could easily sway their votes. Normal people allowed him and my Mother to go unchecked in several areas because they stood to gain something from the Witch, or her overly glorified, semi-sentient dildo, or in some cases, both.” Huffing, Lotor curls his long, graceful legs up to his chest. “Normal people saw the lengths to which I went in order to avoid returning to my parents’ house and never thought to wonder _why_ a boy who allegedly had everything would ever want to avoid a place that ostensibly positioned him in the lap of luxury.”

Shiro has so many things he wants to say to this little speech.

But before he can figure out the right words for any of them, Lotor rests his chin on his knees with a throaty sound. It’s so morose that Shiro butts his lion’s head against Lotor’s thigh. He doesn’t want to interrupt when Lotor looks so abjectly miserable, but their current positions are awkward for hugging—so, why not offer Lotor some comfort from a cuddly stuffed toy? Maybe most people wouldn’t find as much solace in Shiro’s lion as he does, but Lotor is not most people. He’s never been most people in his entire life, as far as Shiro knows.

Carding his spidery fingers through Kuroi’s mane, Lotor hums. “What truly confuses me, though, darling? Is that you hardly _need_ to hear my anecdata. You have more than ample experience with the pettiness, dishonesty, indifference, emotional parsimony, and casual, unthinking cruelty of _normal_ people. If you would prefer not to acknowledge what they have done to you, then you can still consider what Keith suffered. And there’s Ryou, of course—”

“Yeah, but he was better at shrugging off bullies. Got more upset about what they did to _me_.”

“Considering how badly you were tormented, can you honestly say that you blame him?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, no. Can you hand me my chapstick, please?” Once he has it safely on his lips, Shiro blows at a stray piece of bleached white hair. “Anyway, I guess I still care about being normal because I _know_ it hasn’t made me happy. But I keep feeling like, ‘But what if it _might_.’”

“You would have an easier time finding happiness in a haystack made from used needles.”

“If it’s made from used needles, then how is it a _hay_stack?”

“It’s a figurative haystack.” Lotor quirks his shoulders and uncurls one of his legs. “That being said? All I initially meant to say was that your symptoms are unlike any Hanahaki flare-up that I have seen, experienced, or read about before. Most of the time, the coughing is continuous. Not so much so that people cannot breathe, but one typically does not go more than twenty-four hours without spewing a garden everywhere until the flare-up has reached its natural end. Much of the medical and scientific research suggests waiting at least three weeks before saying that a flare-up has ended, but that cautionary note comes out of concern for more than whether or not someone hacks up flowers.”

“Concern for what? Whether or not somebody has blood in their lungs because of this?”

“Fortunately, statistics suggest that Hanahaki-induced pulmonary bleeding is fairly uncommon.”

“How is that even possible, though? Yes, it’s a good thing, but if you _really_ think about it?”

“Contemporary medical science has no agreed upon explanation, darling.”

A deep breath doesn’t make Shiro feel any less insane for what he’s thinking. “Look, at the risk of sounding like Lance: we all have this disease that makes us cough up flowers that appear in our lungs through no process that science can explain. It sets in because we feel like our loves are unrequited. Somehow, the flowers represent the people who made us cough them up, and don’t act like this is just weird significance that humans have created for ourselves—”

“Why would I dispute centuries of conclusive evidence? Besides, no one else but you could induce such gorgeous black roses.”

“But what if it’s really magic?” Shiro winces from inhaling too sharply, then from sighing too hard. “I mean, it’s one thing that we can’t explain where the pneumo-flora come from. We can’t always explain where cancer or mental illnesses come from, either, so it’s not entirely weird that we can’t explain pneumo-flora. But the fact that they don’t make people _bleed_ more often? That doesn’t strike you as strange? Maybe even magical?”

“Perhaps, but I lack the necessary resources to properly investigate these questions, whether through an experiment or through an observational study. Funding, for one thing.” Sighing, Lotor reaches down to ruffle Shiro’s hair and gives him a weak smile. “Since I can do nothing about that, tell me: did you have _any_ continuous days of coughing?”

“Um. The first two days after we got back? But then it went kinda…” Shiro blinks at the Emilie Autumn poster hanging above his bed. “I kept taking the meds until my first box ran out, though? And if you aren’t coughing, doesn’t that mean they’re _working_?”

“Most of the available over-the-counter meds are _supposed_ to make you cough. The same principle holds true for the prescription medications.” As if he can tell that Shiro’s frowning and lost, Lotor explains, “Flare-ups of Hanahaki do not simply go away. The medicines currently available help you clear the flowers out before your leukocytes and immunological responses can wreak havoc on your lungs. Or before the flowers can do the same. People who can repress those coughs are so rare that the only evidence I have personally seen is anecdotal—”

“Great. I really needed something else to be broken about me—”

“_Nothing_ about you is broken. However, I do find it concerning that you can take expectorants and still go for days or weeks at a time without hacking up a single petal. Based on how you and Ryou described what happened earlier, the flowers are building up, rather than your flare-ups subsiding… I could still be wrong, of course. For once, I rather hope that I am, but…” Sniffing, he gently thwaps at Shiro’s cheek. “Promise that you will not laugh at what I am about to say?”

Shiro grunts softly as he makes himself sit up and face Lotor. “I’ll do my best.”

“Considering how often we tell Lance off for ludicrous suggestions about vampires, or merfolk, or whatever he thinks he’s talking about this week? I cannot help but feel hypocritical for this. However…” Lotor tongues at his lips and flips his cowlick back. “I’m reminded of an old Altean myth. Certain folk tale distillations survived after the rise of Christianity, but the older versions involve Alor and Amue, two of my personal patron deities, so I am partial to those.”

When Shiro nods for him, Lotor sighs. “Although specifics vary from ancient author to ancient author, the myth holds that the phenomenon we now call Hanahaki disease? Came from one of the Heavenly Twins’ magical mishaps. In some versions, they intended to help one of their most beloved humans cope with unrequited love by providing her with something beautiful and she wished that she could always carry this beauty with her. In others, Hanahaki disease was intended as a punishment. Someone saw the Twins while they bathed in a river, or attempted to rape someone in one of the Twins’ temples or holy sites, or committed sacrilege against love itself on one of the Twins’ sacred days, or similar.

“In my favorite version, though? Pneumo-flora first infected a priestess of the Heavenly Twins. She was a devout woman. Pure and pious, yes, but she tried to honor Alor and Amue by living a life full of love in all its many-splendored flavors.” Pursing his lips, he borrows some of Shiro’s Dr. Pepper chapstick, then huffs. “However, this priestess had fallen for a prince who was truly quite horrid. Not only did he spurn her and break her heart, he also tried to crush her belief in love—which, in the old Altean belief system, encompasses everything we tend to associate with love? But it also includes a more active sense of what it means to love, and this is where my potential hypocrisy truly reaches its peak…”

Lotor sighs, looking Shiro in the eye. “The old Altean ideas posit that love itself is the very substance that holds the universe together. It exists in all living beings, connecting us to one another, to the other animals, to the plants, to the stardust and everything else.”

Taking a deep breath, Shiro nods. “Would you be insulted if I asked a question that involved a comparison to _Star Wars_?”

“Some of my fellow ethnic Alteans or Altean pagan revivalists might be, but…” Lotor shrugs. “The Force is not an inaccurate comparison. Excluding nonsense such as midichlorians, the major difference between The Force and the old Altean ideas about love? Is that tapping into love as Jedi do with The Force does not grant anyone magical powers. Love is fundamentally divine in nature, but it nevertheless exists independently of the old Altean practices that they called alchemy. Even so, the transcendent, pseudo-magical love connects all life to each other.”

“Fascinating perspective. How does this relate back to whatever you think is going on here?”

“Well, our brokenhearted priestess prayed to Alor and Amue. True, she was hurt, but more than that, she wanted to defend love against its detractors and prove that it exists.” Hugging his shin, Lotor puts his chin back on his knee. “Essentially, this version of the myth holds that what we now call Hanahaki disease is a manifestation not of unrequited love, but of a person’s desire to connect with others. Or perhaps their feelings of estrangement from the people they love.”

“So, in my case… Does the Hanahaki go dormant for days at a time because I feel connected to people?” Shoving down a thought about Lance, Shiro shakes his head. “Or is it more, like, I’m resigning myself to feeling alienated?”

“I have no idea, darling. I also don’t mean to suggest that we should take the Altean myths—or _any_ culture’s Hanahaki myths—as literal guides.” Still, he watches Shiro closely as he says, “But given what you’ve said about how Lance’s _‘Not My Shiro’ _nonsense has affected you? I wonder if there might not be any merit to the idea of Hanahaki as an issue of connectedness.”

“Are you telling me not to isolate myself, this time? No matter how much I feel like I should?”

Lotor nods. “If nothing else? It may not clear up your Hanahaki, but… Having a support network means very little if one does not rely on the people in said network. We can try to help, if you let us. Besides, is there any substitute for time with Keith? Or Ryou? Or anyone else?”

Giving Lotor a small smile, Shiro shuffles around to sit by him. “There’s no substitute for time with you, either. Just so you know.”

Slouching into Shiro’s side, Lotor doesn’t make a sound. Not even when Shiro curls his arm around Lotor’s shoulders.

But it’s okay that Lotor doesn’t want to talk. Sometimes, words fall too short, anyway.


	20. Chapter 20

On one hand, Allura gave Keith the message about how he needed to get himself home after his shift because Shiro got sick.

On the other hand, though, whatever she told him not only included the Hanahaki part of everything, it also makes Keith question his and Shiro’s plans for the weekend. Before letting Shiro go out for his morning run, Keith insists that he can either get in his 10km—“And go use a treadmill at the gym for it, okay? Or the one that Lotor and Zethrid keep in their basement? It’s freezing outside and the air is super-dry. That’s a great way to make your Hanahaki worse”—_or_ Shiro can get his strength and resistance routine in. Doing both, however, has been ruled out by the supreme executive order of Shiro’s boyfriend.

Not that Shiro wants to argue with Keith, of course, but these rules do feel moderately unnecessary.

“You have Hanahaki and we’re planning to have sex all weekend,” Keith points out through his pre-caffeination bleariness, rubbing his eye and grumbling. “Yeah, I’ve had sex while having a flare-up. But I’m used to them. _You_ aren’t. Add in how Ryou and Lotor _both_ said your flare-up is theatre kid levels of dramatic, and if you want to get any dick from me while I’m off work? You’ll chill out and let yourself take it easy.”

Considering his options, Shiro shrugs. “My usual routine works fine for One-Punch Man.”

“Yeah, but Saitama doesn’t have to consider Hanahaki, does he. Unlike you.” Flopping over on Shiro’s mattress, Keith puts his head in Shiro’s lap and nuzzles at his thigh. “Sex counts as a workout. So, you don’t need to do both of your usual things. And if you _do_ go through with both, then you don’t need to have sex. Choice is yours, Pretty Boy.”

Although he rolls his eyes, Shiro gently ruffles Keith’s hair. “You’re throwing that nickname in here to manipulate me.”

“Damn right,” Keith sighs contentedly. “Is it working? Or are you gonna go do something stupid that doesn’t end in sex?”

Of all the potential answers to that question, only one sounds good to Shiro.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that Keith lets up on worrying. When Shiro gets back from his run, Keith won’t let him take a shower until he downs a mug of the peppermint-and-eucalyptus tea that Antok always recommends for Hanahaki flare-ups. He invites himself into the bathroom when Shiro accidentally almost-swallows his toothpaste and hacks it up in the sink. While Shiro makes Keith the lunch he asked for—a fairly light omelette, so he’ll have more room for what he wants to do later—Keith sidles up beside him, and rather than tugging Shiro down into a kiss, he puts a thermometer into Shiro’s mouth.

“Ninety-eight degrees, dead even,” he announces, with a smug, kittenish smile. “You’re good.”

Shiro huffs and prods a spatula at the pan full of eggs. “And the point of that was… What?”

“Hanahaki may not be an infection exactly, because I guess it doesn’t fit someone’s arbitrary definitional rules—”

“God, did Lotor make you some ridiculous information packet—”

“Maybe. But that’s not the point.” As if this somehow communicates the alleged point, Keith swats Shiro on the backside and doesn’t smirk at the squeak that this elicits. “Like I was saying? Hanahaki isn’t technically an infection. But it does still cause fevers in some cases. Especially when _someone’s_ lungs are going harder on the drama than Lance does on opening nights of his shows.”

“Guess that’s why my head felt like it was on fire, yesterday.” Shiro huffs, adding two more slices of cheese. Watching Keith’s eyes light up with desire, he smiles—but still needs to ask, “What about the chest, though? Is Hanahaki coughing _supposed_ to make you feel cold there? Before the coughing starts, I mean. Does it _always_ feel like you swallowed liquid nitrogen?”

Keith nods. “Don’t ask me why because I have no idea. And none of the research Lotor emailed me had the first clue either.”

“That’s so weird, though, isn’t it? Making you get a fever everywhere _but_ your chest.”

“That’s just how Hanahaki works. It’s done that to me ever since I first coughed up black dahlias over my Mom leaving.”

“I get that’s how it works, but come on. Does literally any other illness do that to people?”

“Dammit, Shiro! I’m a book-jockey and amateur porn star, not a _doctor_.”

Before Shiro can decide what he wants to say to this, Keith whines, pulling a pouty face that begs Shiro to please find his riff on Dr. McCoy endearing. Which isn’t necessary, because Keith _is_ endearing—but Shiro leans down to press a quick kiss at the corner of his mouth regardless. If his boy needs positive reassurance, then showering Keith in that is part and parcel of being Keith’s boyfriend. That’s just kind of how dating works.

Still, as Shiro turns back to his pan, he says, “I’m not saying that I don’t understand the _what_ of everything. It’s the _why_ and _how_ that are bugging me. Partly, the mundane reality of Hanahaki is not what I expected, even seeing how many times you’ve had it—”

“All I wanted to say,” Keith sighs, “was that your expectations about the Hanahaki? Maybe they were never gonna reflect reality.”

“You’re probably right. And learning I was wrong is gonna help with the next batch of revisions on the screenplay. Maybe I can finally work out the part where everyone can tell which sections are mine because the Hanahaki isn’t realistic.” With a huff, Shiro switches off the stove and spatulas Keith’s omelette onto a plate. “But now that I’m dealing with it, even knowing this is how things go? Understanding that or not, I’m still just _baffled_ by how much about Hanahaki doesn’t actually make any sense. Not when subjected to any meaningful level of scrutiny.”

“Yeah, well, Marlon Brando had sex with Richard Pryor and dommed the fuck out of James Dean. Michigan has a law against chaining alligators to fire hydrants. You’re more likely to get canonized by the Catholic church than you are to win the lottery, but some people still hit the goddamn jackpot twice. The FDA was first created because of Upton Sinclair’s _The Jungle_, and more people are bitten annually by_ New Yorkers _than they are by sharks.”

Rattling off random facts like this wouldn’t be odd for Keith—except for how he leans up to steal a kiss and looks Shiro in the eye. “We live in a crazy, mixed up world, Babe,” he whispers, trailing his fingers down Shiro’s cheek. “I know telling you not to think about things doesn’t work. But sometimes, there _aren’t_ any answers that we can understand or even know. You’ve got better things to do with your life than sit-ups and navel-gazing about why Hanahaki is what it is.”

“You mean like you?” Shiro stops dead in his tracks, cringing before he gets within kissing distance of Keith’s mouth. “I mean, y’know—I was trying to say? Because aside from a blow-job, I’m supposed to top for you, this weekend? So, I’d be doing _you_, and that’s way better than navel-gazing or—”

“I get the joke, _Lance_,” Keith drawls, smirking. “God, between that and conspiracy theories—”

“Hey, I don’t have conspiracy _theories_. I have, like… Questions that are in the vague vicinity of loosely conspiratorial—”

“Anyway, I meant more like, ‘Deciding what you want to do for your birthday.’” As he picks up his plate, Keith tucks Shiro’s white fringe behind his ear. “And like, ‘Making your own lunch and coughing something up before the pizza guy gets here.’ Because unless you do both of those things by then, your mouth isn’t going anywhere near my dick.”

Shiro smiles. “Duly noted, Baby.”

Good thing lunch is easy to figure out. Keith had the right idea, asking for an omelette; Shiro just fills his with vegetables and doesn’t grease the pan with butter. By the time the pizza guy shows up with Keith’s pies and cheesy breadsticks, Shiro’s also filled a Stop-N-Shop bag with fourteen blossoms and a heap of excess petals. Objectively, this sucks and is horrible. On the positive side of things, though, Keith pets Shiro’s hair during his three rounds of coughing. He makes Shiro wait and brush his teeth again before giving up a kiss, but he sucks on Shiro’s lip so sweetly that Shiro almost feels like he could start hacking up again.

With Hunk visiting family for the weekend, things are quiet and blessedly free of judgment. Yes, Shiro misses him. Yes, he knows that he and Hunk have things to discuss, and apparently, giving Hunk space is only working out in a way that can only barely be so-called. Yes, Shiro’s going to need to take the initiative eventually because one of his best friends and flatmates is all but outright stonewalling him—but that’s not going to happen this weekend and right now? Between jerry-rigging all the cameras that they’ll need and going over the plan for this clip, Shiro’s got more than enough on his metaphysical plate. He doesn’t need to deal with Hunk getting on his case for… God, probably _everything_, considering how he’s decided to spend over six weeks idiopathically angry with Shiro.

“Are you really up for more humiliation after Thursday, Babe? Also, how does this look.”

Shiro glances over to Keith’s closet. Although his black jeans hug his body tightly, and although their waistband’s giving him a sizable muffin-top, Keith got them buttoned up and zipped with minimal effort. If he’d picked another top, he could wear these jeans to work without running afoul of any dress code violations. But Shiro gasps at how snug Keith’s brick red t-shirt is, at how the fabric strains around his wide, plump, stretch-marked belly and still fails to keep him covered.

He means to give Keith an actual answer, but Shiro’s voice dies and his cheeks flush hot as he realizes what the design stretched out on Keith’s chest is. Faux-distressed white block letters spell out _“Glazek High School,” _haloed in a half circle around a picture of a cartoon fish, reared up on its tail and holding both fins up like it’s ready to fight. Underneath, more block letters spell out, _“Cherry Grove, Connecticut” _and, _“Class of 2010.”_

Keith’s commemorative shirt from graduation, bearing their high school’s joke mascot, the Fighting Tuna. Shiro has a similar top still buried in the back of his closet even though, before losing weight, he hadn’t been able to wear it comfortably for a couple years. The biggest differences are that Shiro got his shirt in black, and his and Ryou’s both say, _“Class of 2008.”_

“Come on, Pretty Boy,” Keith says, voice lilting in a way that Shiro can’t entirely decipher. “Tell me what you think.”

“Jesus,” Shiro whispers. Hands trembling around the camera he’s toggling with, he shakes his head. “_Seriously_, Baby?”

“Mmm, seriously.” Keith smirks as if he’s up to something, and God, Shiro hopes he is. Ducking his chin in a way that almost makes him look demure, Keith wiggles his hips—makes his belly wobble back and forth—and his shirt’s hem inches up far enough to expose his belly-button. “It’s not too much, you think? I’m worried about it maybe being too much—”

“No, you _aren’t_.” As soon as he says so, Shiro’s lips pucker up of their own accord and he can’t stop staring at Keith’s midsection. God, he knows he should look Keith in the eye—but Keith keeps jostling his own flesh, keeps making all of that soft chub move around like he’s trying to get Shiro hypnotized. He’ll manage that for real, if he keeps that up. “You look… fantastic. Okay, Keith? Amazing, like, completely gorgeous. But are you, like… Are you really, absolutely…”

Shiro inhales sharply, as if this will really keep him from stumbling over the question. From stumbling over the realization not just of what he means to ask, but of where the question comes from and why he even wants to ask.

“Are you sure that you want to wear that?” Shiro hates how the question sounds as soon as it leaves his lips. “I mean, you _do _look fantastic—and I don’t know if there’s anything that we could have to worry about with copyrights—”

“Honestly, we could get busted so much more easily for all the times that I wear stuff like my Dolly Parton shirts—”

“But, like… That’s a pretty recognizable logo? At least, for some of us. And the Internet is a big place? So, people could easily see it? And it’s not like we can, y’know, preclude the idea that any of our old classmates will see you as Akira Crimson—”

“Do you want me to look through my subscribers list? I mean, some of them might’ve changed their names by now, or found aliases to use—Hell, somebody from back home might be in the Witness Protection Program, by now—”

“I’m just feeling, like?” Shiro jerks his shoulders and vaguely waves his hands around in front of his chest as if this will somehow magically summon up the words he wants. It doesn’t, but it _does_ help him spit out, “People could recognize you. Maybe not me, but _definitely_ you. But, like? Aren’t you worried about that? Especially like, what if they take it to your Facebook page and out you—”

“I wonder if I should make an official Facebook page as Akira. It _would_ go nicely with the website—”

“Baby, _seriously_.” Moving over to Keith might not be necessary, but Shiro breathes a bit more easily while he’s brushing his fingers through Keith’s hair, pushing those soft, black locks back off his face. “I’m not trying to tell you that you _can’t_ wear it. You look _amazing_, and if you want to wear it, then I’m fine with that. But I just want you to remember that you might be inviting all kinds of trouble into your life with this. People could recognize you. They could publicly out the connection between Keith Kogane and Akira Crimson. I don’t know _what_ would happen if they did that, but it could probably get awkward, at the very least.”

Taking a deep breath, Keith nods. He’s clearly thinking things over—but he loops his arms around Shiro’s waist anyway. He tugs himself just close enough to squish up ever so slightly on Shiro’s abs. It’s a teasing embrace, not full-on, baiting Shiro with the promise that they can have so much more of this later, once they get things worked out to their satisfaction.

“All of our friends already know that I do porn.” Brushing his fingertips up and down Shiro’s spine, Keith makes himself look Shiro in the eye. “Kolivan and Antok already know that I do porn. Ryner probably knows, or I think she’s been intimating that she doesn’t care as long as I don’t talk about it too explicitly while I’m on the job. Hell, Aunt Satomi and Aunt Naoko know that I do my own porn, and your Grandfather knew that I made extra money as a cam-boy before he passed away. Clearly, I don’t mind people knowing, and they can’t non-consensually humiliate me because I don’t think there’s shame in anything we’re doing here. Period.”

“But it’s not so much about the humiliation? They could try to rain down all kinds of other consequences—”

Sighing heavily, Keith squeezes closer to Shiro and nuzzles gently at his chest. “If anyone from high school wants to pay us for these clips, then let them. I would take them all to the cleaners—like massively, unethically overcharge every single one of them—for what they did to you. If they wanna get off to our feeder porn after all of that, then they’re a bunch of _hypocrites_, and even bigger _assholes_ than we already knew, and I don’t care that they see us because we can take their money.”

Shiro takes a deep breath of his own. It doesn’t clear his head any, but it _does_ help him say, “I’m not opposed to that. And I agree with you, mostly. But overcharging people feels squiffy to me—even if we were overcharging _Melissa_, it feels like a really bad business practice—”

“That little bitch is one of the few people who I _wouldn’t _overcharge.” Scowling, Keith clings to Shiro even more tightly—not enough to hurt him, but enough to make Shiro feel like he can’t escape until Keith believes that he understands whatever Keith thinks he’s on about today. “Kashi, trust me: unless Adam’s sister has got Jeff Bezos as a fucking sugar daddy? And unless she’s willing to make him pay off student loans for everybody in The Gang, _then_ give you and Lotor all the money you need to make your movie? I will block her outright and refuse to sell her _anything_. She doesn’t deserve _anything_ good from you—and she definitely doesn’t deserve to get happiness from _your_ happiness—not after what she put you through.”

Which fills Shiro’s chest with a mostly inexplicable feeling of _warm_ and _safe _and _pink_—but it doesn’t stop him from sighing as he cups a hand around Keith’s cheek. He wouldn’t mind if his thoughts would catch up with him, if they’d give him an easier time with this. On the other hand, he shouldn’t argue with a free excuse to take in all the details of Keith’s face. From his smooth skin to his high cheekbones, to those impossibly beautiful, violet eyes and the way he’s furrowing his brow in a mix of concern and consternation.

Huffing softly, Shiro presses a kiss at the top of Keith’s head, then right on his hairline.

“I love you, Baby,” he says, ducking his chin and slouching so he can butt his own forehead into Keith’s. “And if _you_ aren’t worried about someone from the old neighborhood recognizing you and blasting it all over the Internet? Then I’m good. I won’t worry about that, either.”

Keith hums. Nods. Squints slightly as he says, “What about you, though? Someone could recognize _you_.”

“They probably _wouldn’t_, though.” Shiro jerks his shoulders, which only makes Keith narrow his eyes even further. Brushing Keith’s bangs back again, Shiro wilts and lets slip a sigh (which he regrets as soon as something twinges in his chest, but he can’t take it back). “I mean, if you hear Lance and Pidge and Ezor tell it, I’m so unrecognizable that I might as well be a different person. Never mind poor Laura—I mean, she still doesn’t know that she _has_ seen what I look like, now. So, if anybody recognizes you, they’re probably gonna think I’m just your costar.”

Keith screws up his face in a pensive pout. “Well, okay, Shiro. If you’re sure about that?”

Shiro nods. “Still not sure why you’d ever want to wear one of our high school’s shirts again, but if it works for you, then that’s fine.”

This, finally, makes Keith grin. His whole face lights up with a wolfish gleam to it, and there’s no doubt in Shiro’s mind that Keith is up to _something_. Either there’s a plan behind the lazy way he palms at Shiro’s backside, or he has certain new ideas for the clip they’re shooting this afternoon. Or, Hell, maybe Shiro’s wrong on both of those counts, and Keith’s simply excited to shoot this clip as _boyfriends _doing porn together, rather than as old friends who trust each other doing porn together.

“You really wanna know what the significance of this t-shirt is, Babe?” Copping a firm feel of Shiro’s ass, Keith smirks. “Those sad, useless, bullying fuck-wads made you miserable for _years_ about your weight, and being gay, and then for liking sex. Never mind having the audacity to like sex while being too gay and too fat for their pathetic little minds to handle. They say that living well is the best revenge, right? Because that’s pretty much exactly what we’re doing here: living well, and having orgasms, and making money because people love to watch us get off with each other.”

Gasping softly, Keith rocks against Shiro’s hips. He breathes a heated, longing sigh against Shiro’s Adam’s apple. “Kashi, even if none of them ever sees this clip? I can’t think of a better way to stick it to every single fucking one of them than by shooting a clip that’s all about the joy of gay sex, fat sex, and fat, gay sex.”

Dimly, Shiro wonders if that logic would make any sense to literally anyone Keith. He wonders if he only feels like it makes sense to him because he has Keith right here, nestled so close against his front and teasing Shiro in a way that makes all potential arguments seem so silly and superfluous. It could so easily be the case that he’s losing touch with his higher brain—and possibly with any semblance of ethics or self-preservation—because Keith is acting like a minx, and presenting a pro-vengeance case that doesn’t involve confronting anyone from high school, but _does_ involve having some amazing sex.

Somewhat more pressingly, however, Keith slithers along his stomach and kneads his bulging, beautiful belly against Shiro’s abs. Edging onto his toes, he leans up to steal himself another kiss. Even if Shiro _wanted_ to argue in the face of Keith’s approach to convincing him, he isn’t certain that he’d make it through the first point in his case.

Okay, so Shiro’s thinking with his dick right now. Big deal. Keith still seems happy with the arrangement—at least, if the way he sucks on Shiro’s tongue is any indication. Besides, they wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place, if it weren’t for Shiro digging holes by following his heart and failing to use his brain in the right sorts of ways.

Who knows? Maybe he’ll improve things by letting his dick take charge for a while instead.


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Features stuffing, teasing, fat talk/feedist dirty talk, Dom/sub play (in which Shiro arguably cannot dom his way out of a wet paper bag, but bless him, he’s trying), humiliation, orgasm delay/denial, oral, and toys.

Alone in the bathroom, Keith leans on the sink and takes several deep breaths. This shoot is going to be fine.

Why wouldn’t it be fine? He’s played an overly submissive caricature of himself how many times before? He’s made how many payments on the car or his student loans because he hasn’t had any scruples about doing porn, about slipping into this particular side of Akira’s character and playing it up as much as any given client wants to pay him for?

Scrubbing a wet washcloth over his face, Keith runs over the mental interventions that Ulaz has tried to get him to do whenever he catches himself being a big Negative Nancy. He’s blowing the bad aspects of this situation out of proportion; he _knows_ how to get through a shoot, he knows how to get through a shoot with _Shiro_, and he goddamn well knows how to take a dick. He’s getting himself worked up because he’s scared, turning everything into a catastrophe before _any_thing has actually happened, and talking himself down from doing something that he and Shiro both understand and agreed to do. He’s reducing the situation to a series of bad outcomes that have little to no relation to reality.

Besides, Keith’s worrying extra unfairly, considering that he’s making this clip with Shiro for a partner. Not with some pseudo-anonymous client on the other end of a webcam, leering and giving him orders or suggestions, but _Shiro_, the guy he trusts with this most, _his_ Shiro. There’s no reason for his reflection to look so pale, or for his jaw to be so tight, or for him to act like this is anything he hasn’t already fantasized about doing with Shiro. Or that they haven’t done things like this. Or that Shiro would let anything bad happen to Keith when he has the power to keep that from coming true. Shiro would sooner die himself than let anything bad happen to Keith.

(Granted, Shiro dying would be its own form of bad thing that could happen to Keith, and his understanding of that fact goes back and forth. Lately, he’s seemed to grok the concept more than not, though. For example, he’s listening to Keith and Lotor about his Hanahaki instead of trying to find some reason why he doesn’t need to take care of himself, or why his flare-up isn’t that bad. Maybe it’s not much to go on—but considering the learning curve that Shiro needs to get graded on? Keith will take it.)

Which is all encouraging. It gets Keith to breathe more easily, helps his face feel cleaner as he washes it again.

He’s going to be fine. Shiro’s going to be fine. This clip is going to go perfectly. None of the awful things Keith’s nerves are telling him will come to pass. Everything is going to be fine because Shiro will help see Keith through it. There’s no reason for Keith to scare so badly about what they’re doing.

Worse, there’s no reason for Keith to hesitate—and no time for it, either. Not when Shiro’s waiting for him.

God, he’s supposed to be getting the initial shots of this clip in here. Establishing which side of Akira’s on display for the story here, setting up the focus of everything, putting himself in the right Akira mindset—_that_ is Keith’s mission, right now. Not worrying himself into a hole or pulling himself back from some unknown abyss. Combing both hands back through his hair, he sucks in a deep breath and it doesn’t make him feel any less like he might sick up.

Maybe it’s time for one of the best suggestions that he’s ever gotten from Lance about literally anything. Close your eyes, dance like nobody’s watching until you get your hips good and loosened up, put yourself in a frame of mind that simply doesn’t care about what you look like or what other people may or may not think of you. Focus on the story and the emotions that you want to convey in whatever scene you’re playing out tonight, and try to get yourself in the zone, whichever zone you need.

Mussing his fingers through his hair, Keith twitches his hips. His thighs chafe against each other, and his belly jiggles, and there’s a weird sort of comfort in that. What’s their story? Akira’s supposed to be coming onto Sable super-hard, trying to talk him into taking Akira on as a feedee. And it’s not supposed to be an easy conversation. Sable’s playing hard to get, and Akira has to do his best possible job of convincing Sable to give him a shot. Put in sustained effort over the entire clip, even after Sable cuts a deal with him.

But there it is—that’s Keith’s motivation, right there in the lyrics that he threw out because they’re pretty close to how he feels about Shiro.

Akira wants Sable to be his as much as he wants to be Sable’s. Akira wants Sable to see the promise in him as a feedee and take him on personally. Akira wants _Sable_, wants to submit to Sable and give him that control, wants to be with Sable in the ways that Keith’s wanted to be with Shiro for so long—except that Akira doesn’t have the promise that Sable will ever take him on. Not like Keith knows he has Shiro’s love.

Which could get a little problematic for the post-production process, depending on how Keith and Shiro play off of each other, once they get going. Still, there are worse fates than doing reshoots. At least the visuals for these shots should be right on the money—or that’s what Keith gets out of his reflection. The way he’s put on a pair of bedroom eyes… The way his shirt rides up on him and exposes such a wide strip of pale, increasingly stretch-marked skin… How his hips sway back and forth as he pretends to argue with the hem, and how he betrays his own intentions by smirking just a bit too much…

But that’s perfect for Akira. Perfect because he knows damn well that he’s chubby. He knows damn well that he’s beautiful. His pudgy belly rounds out, pushing against the fabric of this old shirt—stretching out the logo of that high school Hell so much, Keith hopes that the cracks in the decal stick around after this shoot is done—and as he moves, another song comes to mind. Not one that Keith needs to sing, but one that gives him the right idea for how to move.

Stretching out his back again, he turns another deep breath into another excuse for a moan. Tries to picture himself in low-rider jeans that he has to button underneath his belly. They’d be so tight, every shift of Keith’s hips would threaten to split the seams and leave his thighs exposed. The slightest shift forward might make the seam up his ass pop wide open. Instead of this old shirt from his and Shiro’s high school, he’d have some hot pink crop-top so skimpy, it might as well just be a bra. Or green fabric that only covers his chest.

He’d set Shiro up to watch him dance and jiggle around… Maybe on the sofa, maybe on the edge of Keith’s bed, doesn’t really matter as long as he can appreciate the show… And as Keith jerked his hips back and forth, making his belly shake in all directions, Keith would wear a live boa constrictor as a scarf…

But they can get back to this “I’m A Slave 4 U” fantasy later on. He can drag Shiro into it and ask for his creative input. After they’re done working for the day, Keith can cuddle Shiro close and tell him everything he’s thinking of, and ask him how he feels about doing some kind of homage in a future clip. As long as they make sure whatever they do is legally covered under the fair use clauses of free speech, then they should be fine—and come on, Keith would look really hot in low-riders and a barely-there top.

For now, Keith channels that energy into batting his eyelashes at his own reflection. Tries to imagine that he’s rolling his ass against Shiro’s hips as he loosens up his back. Pretends that the hands cupping the underside of his tummy are Shiro’s and not his own—which makes his next moan come from somewhere deeper in his chest. God, he sounds _needy_… Their clients are gonna love that. He ducks his chin specifically so the extra chub around his jawline will pooch out more than usual, looks up at the ceiling through the shield of his lashes so that the camera attached to the medicine cabinet will get a good image of him acting like a little minx.

Or a not-so-little minx, as the case happens to be. For this shoot, the camera hovering closest to the scale is a mere formality—a courtesy because, no matter what Shiro tries to tell himself or anyone else about what turns him on, he _loves_ hearing the exact numbers of how much Keith he has to love—but they won’t use any of those shots in the final product. They can’t. If the numbers actually went down, then that would be a different matter entirely, since it’d fit with the story they’re trying to tell in this clip.

Instead, when the scale gives Keith a readout—when he sucks in his belly more than he needs to do so he can see the red, digital numbers on the screen—he has to fight himself to keep from whooping in victory. _228.5_, that’s what the scale says. Two-hundred-twenty-eight whole pounds, plus an extra. Keith’s gained another ten pounds from the last time they got him up on a scale—which was _barely _ten days ago. Which, in turn, makes his head spin with delight. Makes him sink his hands into his belly-fat before he can think better of it, all so he can give it a good, firm shake and feel all his chub wobbling.

How he manages to make his sigh come out as a distressed whine, Keith doesn’t know. All his mind can focus on? Is the way that his flesh gives so nicely underneath his hands, and the way he can sink his fingertips so far into his chub that it feels like he could lose them, and the fact that he really has put on almost eighty pounds since he started gaining, exactly like Shiro teased him over on Thursday night. There’s no way that Shiro could’ve meant that number exactly—at best, he was guessing while caught up in the moment and fuck, it was so hot—and yet, there it is. Keith’s dangerously close to hitting two-hundred-and-thirty pounds. Which means he’s getting closer to two-fifty, his hundred-pound gain milestone.

Christ, he’s put on twenty-five of these extra pounds—almost a third of everything he’s gained—in the nearly-six weeks since Shiro and Lotor got back from California. Maybe it’s not the bulk of his gaining, but this weight has come on faster than anything else. Explains how much tighter some of his work-safe jeans have been feeling lately… He’ll probably need to invest some of the cash from tomorrow’s commission on sizing up again, and it might not hurt to resell some of his jeans instead of keeping them around to bust out of in a future clip…

Thankfully, that thought helps Keith twist his face up into a pout. Helps get him through slouching and whining, like he’s supposed to. Maybe Keith Kogane has put on weight again, but according to the plan for this clip in particular, Akira Crimson has lost three pounds, hence him needing Sable’s help. Poking at his belly, Keith can’t pretend it doesn’t squish so well under his touch—but he can pretend that he hasn’t gained enough. That dredges up a good, solid round of grousing.

Back in front of the mirror, he leans closer to it than he did before. He might undermine some of the story with the fact that he can set his belly on the edge of the sink—but Keith’s more concerned with his face. With prodding and pinching at his cheeks. Wobbling his blossoming double-chin and rubbing at the softness he’s put around his jawline. Sure, his gains show the least around his face—most of the time, it’s only _really_ noticeable when a more recent pic of him gets compared to an older one, or when someone hasn’t seen him in a while—but this little bit of facial chub is better than nothing, Keith supposes.

For the moment, not having much of it helps Keith screw up another pout. Helps him _feel it_ when he stomps his foot like someone didn’t give him a pony for his latest birthday. Petulance, that’s good. Exactly the right mood. Brattiness and determination, mixed with a liberal helping of desire and frustration. He hasn’t gained nearly enough weight. Hasn’t gotten big enough to make himself happy. He needs so much help because he needs to get bigger and fatter, needs to keep gaining weight, needs to let himself go so he can be so much _more_.

Sucking in his belly, he tugs his shirt’s hem down to where it’s meant to hit him. Sure, it rides up again when he exhales, but Keith keeps his abs pulled in enough that the shirt doesn’t expose too much. Uncomfortable? Yes, very—but for the sake of making the clip believable? Keith would suffer through worse fates than needing to utilize muscles that he’s deliberately allowed to go to seed because having this chubby stomach suits him so much more.

Besides, Shiro will probably get riled up if he thinks Keith’s holding out on him—and that thought makes Keith fight to hold back on a grin. Jaw set with resolve, he flips his hair back off his face and huffs. Alright, he’s ready. Time to get his co-star in on this action.

* * *

_“As You Wish.” Akira isn’t gaining fast enough and he wants Sable’s help in getting bigger. But when he goes to ask, Sable doesn’t know if Akira can handle being his feedee. He can see the potential, though, and he likes what he sees of how Akira’s already plumping up. So, he gives Akira a chance to prove himself—but can Akira stomach submitting? Or will the raven-haired feeder prove too much for him? Features stuffing, teasing, fat talk, fondling, Dom/sub, dominant Sable, submissive Akira, humiliation, orgasm delay/denial, oral, and toys._

* * *

As Shiro paces around Keith’s bedroom, all he can focus on is the nagging thought that this clip Keith wants to make is the worst idea that they have ever had between the two of them. Considering that they once got in trouble for pawing around Shiro’s Grandmother’s things out of idle curiosity and touching some old trinket-box that was covered in weird markings, then tried to say that they were looking for props to use in a school play that neither of them had anything to do with? Yeah, this clip has some steep competition in the category of Objectively Terrible Ideas That Keith And Shiro Have Ever Had.

But if Shiro keeps moving, then maybe he won’t dwell on that too much. If he keeps untying and retying his ponytail—if he keeps checking and double-checking the cameras, just to make sure that they haven’t moved around too much in the past ten seconds—if he keeps forcing himself to take deep breaths and resist the impulse to turn the remote-controlled vibrator on and off again? Then Shiro should keep himself distracted enough to refrain from being an utter human disaster in a situation where he has no reason to act like that.

Logically, it’s a pretty simple conclusion. If he keeps his mind and body focused on literally anything else but how little he actually knows about domming anyone, then he will manage his nerves just fine instead of letting them set him on metaphorical fire. If he distracts himself sufficiently, then he can’t dig himself into a shallow grave of anxiety, or give himself a stress-related heart attack, or keel over and drop dead for no apparent reason, because God or Whoever simply got sick of listening to him be such a High-Key Mess.

Maybe Shiro won’t get properly into character as Sable from doing this kind of preparation—but then again, when has he literally ever gotten in-character, the way that Keith can do? Since that’s setting too high a bar to begin with, he’ll settle for keeping in mind everything that he and Keith agreed on. He’ll be fine, as long as he can remember the plan, remember what he needs to do, remember how things are supposed to go in this afternoon’s clip and how he can make the experience as good for Keith as humanly possible.

As Shiro flops onto the edge of the mattress, he feels like someone’s holding his head underwater. God, the chills from Hanahaki coughs are an obvious improvement on this garbage. He’d take an entire hour’s worth of hacking up into a trash can if it meant he could snatch five minutes of relief from feeling like his own mind is going to make him sick.

Worrying his hands through his long fringe, Shiro tries to remember what Sable’s going for in this clip: he’s a feeder, obviously. He’s secure in himself, or at least he gives off that impression. Cold, aloof, and distant. Completely assured that everything about his point of view is right and that he knows what’s best for any boy who might consider becoming his feedee. He sets his bar high, isn’t ready to let anybody satisfy him because he doesn’t know if Akira or anyone can keep up with his desires, doesn’t give any old chubby boy a chance, either. Which leaves Sable lonely because how could it not, so part of him _wants_ Akira to surprise him, _wants_ to take Akira on, make a proper feedee out of him, and spoil him rotten, until any signs of the skinny athlete he used to be melt away, disappearing into a beautiful, plumped up hog—

—Okay, all of this is doable. Maybe none of it comes _naturally_ to Shiro, but as he kneads his temples and fights to keep his breathing even, he _knows_ that he can get through a shoot with this character in mind.

Whether or not he can do it without repeating insults that he heard in school and driving himself up the wall, into the hornet’s nest of a panic attack? Well, he’s gonna need to learn, and he can only get better by working at it. By trying, and trying, and trusting that Keith would tell him if he didn’t thing that Shiro’s dirty talk was hot. Keith would safe-word out if Shiro started getting too close to anything that he’s legitimately sensitive about. Keith put these precautions in place for both of them, and he knows how to use them.

Which is all great for the sake of steadying Shiro’s nerves in one way. But it leaves several other areas of Shiro’s mind twisted up in knots he can’t untie, squirming and writhing with the dread of how badly he could screw up everything.

Not least of which is: Sable’s supposed to be a _dom _in this clip, though. He’s supposed to take control. He’s supposed to rip agency away from Akira, call the shots so that he doesn’t have to, and overpower him entirely but without exceeding any of his limits because Akira can trust Sable (even if this particular clip will lean into the idea of being overwhelmed and play around with a situation that would never fly in real-life). Sable’s meant to do all of these things that Shiro _understands_ because he’s fantasized about them so many times before—but he always casts himself as the _sub_.

Keith trusts him, though. Keith _believes_ in him. If nothing else, Shiro needs to keep his breathing deep and even—needs to fight his baser impulses and suppress his panic—because Keith believes that Shiro can take the idea of this scene and create something that Keith will have fun doing. So help him, Shiro _cannot_ let Keith down, on that count. He can’t allow himself to massively screw up their first clip as boyfriends. He can’t—

“Sable?” Keith calls in a soft voice, almost timid.

—Shiro can’t remember what he’s supposed to say. Not while he’s looking at Keith and Keith’s looking like that.

It shouldn’t take Shiro by surprise, Keith’s appearance. He shouldn’t lose track of his entire brain over the way that Keith’s shorts bunch up around his thighs, wrinkling as he shuffles awkwardly, moving his weight from one foot to the other. Which cannot be comfortable for him, or anyway, it wouldn’t be for Shiro, if their positions were reversed. Even ignoring the difference of how much Keith enjoys his extra weight… Even putting aside the fact that Shiro hated being so big… There’s simply no way in Hell that Keith can enjoy the fabric chafing up against itself so much.

Except for the part where his eyes have an edgy glimmer to them—yes, they’re dewy and wide, but Keith has the look of a man who definitely _is_ enjoying himself. Who likes the way that his clothes fit him too tightly, likes knowing that he’ll probably have outgrown them in short order, if he hasn’t done so already. Which isn’t a new thought in the slightest, and no matter how gorgeous Keith looks—no matter how intoxicating it is that he’s _here_, and he looks the way he does, and he’s radiating confidence that doesn’t quite fit with the side of Akira that he’s supposed to be playing up today—Shiro _should not_ feel dizzy over any of this.

Because it _isn’t_ new—none of these kinks are new—and more importantly, he’s working, now. Boyfriend or not, Shiro needs to summon up a modicum of professionalism and self-respect. At least enough to keep him from spacing out, staring at Keith’s midsection and completely neglecting the job they need to do.

Besides, it’s stupid for Shiro to feel like this in the face of fantasies that he _doesn’t_ need to hide. He’s acting stupid. So completely stupid. He shouldn’t feel like like he’s drowning in the universe’s most humid swamp over the way that Keith swishes his hips as he walks over. He shouldn’t feel his tongue thickening like it’s been shot full of Novocaine from watching Keith’s stomach shifting from side to side in long, slow motions, as if Keith’s trying to hypnotize him (and succeeding very easily). He shouldn’t feel his mouth going drier than Death Valley as he takes in Keith’s t-shirt, stretching and straining around his belly but still riding up enough to expose a sliver of skin.

God, if Shiro didn’t know better, he might think that Keith’s lost weight. Scrubbing a hand down his mouth—inhaling deeply and hoping like Hell that he looks judgmental, that he can somewhat hide how much he’s gaping at Keith—Shiro can’t remember how the shirt fit Keith before he went into the bathroom to get his establishing shots. Can’t remember where the hem fell on Keith’s middle, or how much of him the fabric managed to cover. Did his top really go down so low, nearly meeting the waistband of his shorts (as far as Shiro can tell when he can’t see said waistband, not with a sizable roll of Keith’s belly-fat pooching out over it, hiding it from view)?

Shiro tries to swallow thickly. Tries to find something that he can say. Tries to make his brain behave so he and Keith can do their job here. So what, it’s a job that both of them enjoy? The people on Keith’s message boards have been clamoring for Shiro to get more dominant—even without seeing Thursday night’s clip because Shiro hasn’t started editing it yet—and there’s such a big payday waiting for them, on the other side of this. But only if Shiro can get himself together, and get with the program, and—

“We need to talk, Sable.” Keith’s voice arches both of his eyebrows, even though he keeps his face neutral. “I need your help.”

“My help?” Repeating Keith probably makes Shiro sound stupid—but he can hope. Maybe it’ll come out condescending, like he can’t believe that Akira would ever come to ask him for anything. Because that’s the character. Pushing his white fringe back behind his ear, Shiro straightens his back. “What do you—that doesn’t really tell me what’s—I don’t have time to help if I don’t even know what I’m helping with, Akira. Not even for you.”

Stuttering like that cannot be good for the façade Shiro needs to craft.

But before Keith can pull too confused a face, Shiro adds, “I don’t have time to play any games with you, either. Especially not when you’re the one who’s coming to me out of _nowhere_ like this. What are you _really _after.”

Shiro doesn’t sound nearly cold enough, and the way Keith furrows his brow screams that he agrees. Taking another deep breath, Shiro sits up so straight, he might as well have a rod shoved up his spine. It hurts, sitting at attention like this. But pulling his abs in tighter gives him something that he understands. Not that it really matters—Shiro’s own t-shirt, after all, fits him and leaves quite a bit about his body to the imagination—but if he wanted to take it off, his abs would look great, exactly the way that Shiro wanted them to look. Keith might keep his cool around them in ways that Shiro can’t manage for Keith’s belly, but as long as Keith likes the view, it doesn’t matter.

As long as Shiro doesn’t botch this shoot, nothing else matters, either. Rolling up to his feet, he doesn’t let himself sigh. Doesn’t let himself do anything that might betray the Hanahaki he’s incubating. Stretching out his back like he cannot be bothered, Shiro cheats toward the center and stage-right cameras—which, not coincidentally, means that he cheats his body toward Keith. Maybe Sable can ignore how Akira feels—or at least Sable can put Akira’s feelings about him aside pretty easily—but Shiro wants Keith to look at him. Wants to let Keith know how his boyfriend looks. Wants to give him a show that he can enjoy.

Whatever Keith feels, he stays quiet for long enough that Shiro takes it upon himself to say, “_Well_, Akira? I’m waiting.”

“It’s not like you’re thinking—I’m not trying to _impose_—”

“You’re coming to me and asking for my help with something, aren’t you?” Shiro huffs, tossing his head back and shaking out his ponytail. Milking the moment, he flexes his biceps and angles his hips toward the camera. Maybe he won’t give Keith’s clients any of their actual money-shots, but showing off his body helps establish the differences between him and Keith. “In what way is needing my help _not_ an imposition?”

“You don’t have to do it with me if you don’t _want_ to.” Keith screws his face up in a pout that almost wants to look victorious. He _should_ gloat; he’s made a good point. But that’s not the way that Akira needs to react—at least, not right now. So, Keith slouches, making his belly flop out further (though not as much as it _should_), and he allows himself the chance to whine. “D’you think I’m getting fat?”

_Yes. Very_, Shiro keeps to himself because it’s not what Sable’s supposed to say. Dragging his eyes all over Keith’s body, he forces himself to purse his lips and squint. Tries to size Keith up in the same way that Sable would Akira. _You’re getting so beautifully round and chubby, Baby. And every pound you gain is glorious—_

“I don’t know that I’d call you _fat_,” he sighs and pulls up the most exhausted voice that he can manage. Beckoning Keith over with one finger, Shiro adds, “But I might need to get a _feel_ for the situation before I can commit to an answer.”

“Get a feel? For which—”

“For your _body_, Akira. For what the situation’s like underneath your clothes.” Rolling his eyes, Shiro explains, “I can hardly judge whether or not you’re getting fat based on how you look, alone. Or would you have me give you an inaccurate estimate? Substandard efforts? Are you trying—”

“No, no! Sable, it’s fine, I’m—” Nodding, Keith swallows thickly. His eyes gleam like he might actually be frightened. “Okay, please touch me.”

Following when Shiro crooks his finger again, Keith comes to Shiro’s side. For the first phase of this section, profile shots are the name of the game. A quick glance at Keith’s full-length mirror says that he’s almost definitely holding back: most of the time, the side-view of his belly is so much thicker, so much fuller, so much rounder. He’s hardly _skimping_, but he has enough of his chub sucked in that he looks like he hasn’t been gaining for that long.

With a sigh, Shiro brushes one hand up the side of Keith’s pudgy tummy. He’s gentle—so gentle that Keith whines as if he’s being deprived of something—but when Shiro rests his palm on the fullest curve he can find, he gives Keith a smirk. God, he hopes that Keith goes wide-eyed because he’s confused, like he can’t tell what’s coming, but he knows how much he wants it. Flashing his teeth like a Big Bad Wolf, Shiro nudges his fingertips into Keith’s soft chub. Massages at that flesh without intent in any direction. He inhales sharply when he sinks his fingers in as far as he can, but he jerks his hand away and makes Keith keen at him again.

_Fwump!_

Shiro cracks Keith on the side of his gorgeous little belly. Trying not to whine, Keith bites his lip and gasps. But the best part of the damage is the way his midsection jiggles. Reeling from the impact of Shiro’s slap, Keith’s stomach bobs back and forth, wobbling so much that his meaty pecs get in on the action, too. If he weren’t cocooned in this shirt, the show would be so much better—but they can’t give everything away right off the bat. They need to build it up, need to make sure they get enough of the shots that Keith’s clients want to see the most.

To that end, Shiro eases himself closer to Keith. Not as close as he’d like, but he brushes his abs against Keith’s belly enough that Keith’s cheeks flush bright pink. Chuckling, Shiro pushes Keith’s bangs off his face, tucks a thick lock of hair behind his ear.

“I still don’t think I really know, Akira—”

“You’re right here, though!” Keith’s blush darkens. Either he hears the sharp tone in his voice, or Shiro gets his incredulous eyebrow-arch down right, because Keith gulps as if he’s genuinely out-of-line. He writhes as if he has no idea how it jostles his chub. As if he can’t tell that his tummy’s rubbing up on Shiro’s abs and making Shiro’s throat dry out all over again. “You got a feel, didn’t you? How can you _not tell_—”

“Do _you_ think you’re getting fat?” Shiro drags his tongue along his lips, waiting for an answer that Keith doesn’t give him. He tries zeroing in on Keith’s face. Tries narrowing his eyes at those full, flushed cheeks and puckering his lips into the teasing, ghost of a kiss—but Shiro stops on Keith’s eyes.

It’s like he’s stuttering again. Falling all over himself without moving or saying anything. Jesus, Keith’s eyes… They’re beautiful, so wide and bright and glimmering with so many as-yet unspoken ideas… So many possibilities, and then there are his _lashes_? Shiro has no idea what to do with himself, looking at those long, thick, black lashes. They cloud over Keith’s eyes just enough to torture him, to make his heart twist inside his chest like it’s trying to dodge a knife.

Sniffing, Keith juts his lower lip out even further. “What’s _that_ supposed to mean? Do I think I’m getting fat? I’m asking _you_!”

He gives himself a fight—but thankfully, Shiro wrestles down a sigh of relief.

He lets himself give Keith a small, brief smile. Lets himself have a moment of expressing his gratitude that Keith stepped in and kept Shiro from losing sight of the job while they’re in the middle of doing it—but he curls his lips back into a smirk as quickly as he can.

Shiro lets his tongue dart out across his lips. He’ll hurt for it later—he might need to toss on a layer of chapstick before he can even _think_ of putting Keith’s dick into his mouth—but right now, the idea is to make Keith stare at his mouth. Get him looking at Shiro’s face and not his hands. Keep him focused on the wrong thing, so he won’t see what’s coming for him, not until—

—Keith gasps as Shiro grabs up a sizable roll of chub. As he digs his thumb into Keith’s flesh as if he wants to leave a bruise.

Pinching and rolling the chub around his fingers, Shiro turns his eyes down toward Keith’s belly—God, _not_ looking at Keith’s face makes Shiro’s lungs wriggle like they’re full of electric eels and sick, guilty, dying worms. But he can’t let himself fall too deep into Keith’s eyes or they’ll be completely screwed. It’s too easy to get lost in Keith’s eyes. Shiro needs to pay attention to their work. Needs to keep himself as close to the task at-hand as he can manage. Needs to be professional, and he can go back to being Keith’s boyfriend later, when they’ve finished.

“Well, Akira, I’m asking for your own opinion on your body because it’s important to me.” Instead of doing what he really, _really _wants, Shiro watches Keith squirm as he shakes that beautiful pudge. “Because I _honestly_ cannot tell, for myself, whether or not you’re getting fat. But you must have something in mind, to come asking _me_ about your weight.”

Keith nods, quickly and briefly. “I just… I _want_ to get fat, Sable? I do, I want it…”

“Oh, is that so?” He quirks his brows as Keith nods again. “So, you’re coming and asking me for help with that, then. You’re coming here with a request in your throat, bringing me your _slight_ offering of chub, asking me to pass judgment on your body and your size—” Shiro grabs up a sizable roll of belly-fat, more than anybody _but_ the harshest, coldest feeder-dom would call _slight_. The fact that he can do this while Keith is sucking in his stomach… He fights himself out of gasping about it. Forces himself to sneer at Keith as though he remains unsatisfied. “All because you think that you want to get _fat_.”

“I don’t think, I _know_!” Keith inhales deeply. More than he probably needs—and he lets another whine slip loose when Shiro pinches harder on his tummy-pudge. “I’ve been putting weight on by myself, but it’s not enough… I’m not getting big enough, Sable—”

“Mmm, no? I _suppose_ I can see why you’d say that.” Cupping the underside of Keith’s belly—as much of it as he’s letting anybody grab—Shiro takes a deep, meditative breath and jostles his beautiful chub. He clicks his tongue at the sight of ripples coursing through Keith’s midsection. “Honestly, you probably haven’t gained that much weight. So what, you’ve gotten a little chubby. Everyone puts on a little extra weight in winter—”

“You don’t—”

“Because I practice rigorous self-discipline, Akira. Something that _you_—” For emphasis. Shiro thwaps the side of Keith’s stomach again. “—Have clearly forgotten about in the past few months. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have this spare tire where you _used _to have a tight little six-pack. But all the same?”

He shifts his hand, grabs at one of Keith’s thick, soft love-handles. Losing his fingers in Keith’s flesh once more makes Shiro fight back a sigh—but grabbing Keith here lets him press their middles even closer. Lets him squish his abs against Keith’s beautiful belly. God, heat springs up in the pit of Shiro’s stomach—he bites the inside of his cheek and thinks about how nasty Antok’s Hanahaki tea actually is, how it leaves such a pungent aftertaste and the peppermint comes off like a half-baked apology for how gross the rest is—but he grounds himself, which is the important thing. He keeps kneading at Keith’s torso as if there’s nothing wrong.

He rubs up on Keith as if he _isn’t _trying to keep himself from getting hard so early in the shoot.

“Mmm, there isn’t really _that_ much substance to this tummy yet,” he muses, pressing both palms into Keith’s love-handles. “It’s a _start_, I guess? Especially given how _thin_, and _lean_, and _toned_ you used to be… I can see why you might _think_ you want to get bigger, sure? ‘Cause you _have_ let yourself get pretty chubby… You’d definitely need to _work_ for it if you wanted to slim down and get that star athlete body back—”

“I _don’t _want that, though! That’s the _last_ thing I want!” Keith’s voice jumps up, tighter and higher than he can usually get it. He rocks his hips into Shiro’s, grinds his belly against Shiro’s taut middle. Partly, Keith must want this contact—not that Shiro disagrees. Not that he can blame Keith when he has to stifle a gasp from simply feeling Keith push back into him, feeling all of that warm, soft pudge as it squishes around his muscle and threatens to suck Shiro up into something he can’t escape from.

Not that he’d even bother trying, if that ever happened. Worming his hips against Keith, Shiro can’t imagine a better way to die than getting entirely swallowed up by his boyfriend’s body. Of course, if he died, then he wouldn’t have any future chances to rub on Keith, hopefully satisfying the part of him that wants so much to touch Shiro all over.

Another part of Keith, though, must be falling back on the old principle of stage combat. The person getting smacked around puts in the work to make any slap look real. It’s one of the only things that Shiro remembers from his and Lotor’s undergrad class on the subject, aside from the humiliation of being the only fat guy doing the exercises out on the North Lawn. So, rolling up on Shiro must be Keith’s way of leaning into the action. Making it all look more believable. Helping Shiro look like he’s being harsher, handsier, more demanding.

Can’t let Keith do all the work to sell this story, though. In service of their performance—of their job (and of Keith’s pleasure, hopefully; it’s worthless, getting paid if Keith doesn’t enjoy himself)—Shiro clutches harder at those love-handles. Digs in his fingertips so hard, he makes Keith gasp. Slouching enough to nudge his forehead into Keith’s, Shiro allows himself a chuckle.

“Are you _sure _you don’t want to go back to how you used to be, Akira?”

“Of course I’m sure! I’m here asking you, aren’t I? As if I don’t know what you do—”

“I’m only telling you: getting fat like you’re suggesting is not for everyone, and at the moment? You _do _have options. For now, at least.” Shiro curls a hand around the biggest back-roll that he can find. It’ll make a nice juxtaposition between what he’s saying and reality. “You’re on the chubby side. Let yourself go, that much is obvious—”

“Sure have! Because I wanna be fat—”

“You keep _saying_ that. And I believe that you believe it.” Tutting softly, Shiro shakes his head. He shakes the roll of chub he has in-hand, and grins when this makes Keith blush. “But I don’t feel like you _really_ understand what you’d be getting into. Especially not if you’re asking _me_ to be your feeder. See, all of _this_…”

Dragging his hands down the chub Keith’s gained along his back, Shiro keeps teasing his abs against Keith’s stomach. Gets as close as he can, given the boundaries of their respective shirts and the way that their bodies keep them from merging their physical beings together. He slithers up on Keith in the same way that Keith would do to him. In his head, he tries to summon up a song that he can use to keep himself on rhythm, keep his mind and body focused. Anything with a good groove that he can work against Keith’s body—

—Until he grabs Keith’s ass. Struggling to get a good hold on that plump, round backside, Shiro stretches both hands even harder that Keith’s belly stretches his poor shirt. With the best grip that he can manage, Shiro pushes himself and Keith as close into each other as their bodies will allow. Keith’s squeak makes it that much easier to smirk as if Shiro knows what the Hell he’s doing.

“All this chub is more than you’re used to having,” he purrs, leaning down toward Keith’s ear like a conspirator. “But don’t think this means you’re ready to be a _real_ fat-boy. How can you be ready? You don’t even know what it _means_—”

“But I _want_ to, Sable! Tell me what it means!” Letting himself go wide-eyed, Keith whispers, “_Please_…”

“Mmm, but why should I?” Kissing Keith’s forehead could come off too tenderly and give away the game—but when Keith trembles against him, Shiro keeps his jaw set and his lips pressed into a mask of neutrality. He quirks his eyebrow like he can’t believe the indignities he’s suffering by being made to deal with this conversation. “What’s the point in torturing you like this? Telling you all about a life that you can never lead, a body you can never have—”

“Try me! _Please_ try me—you haven’t even given me a chance to prove myself—”

“You think that you’re special, Akira, but I’ve seen so many guys like you before. So many boys who had no idea what they really wanted.” Cupping one hand around Keith’s cheek, Shiro worms the other one’s fingers in between the rolls of chub along Keith’s back. He nudges his forehead into Keith’s again, leaving his eyes shut so he can’t slip into Keith’s. “You think that you’re ready to be a fat-boy because you put on a little bit of extra weight?”

“_Yes! _Or maybe—but then you aren’t exactly—how am I supposed to—” Keith sucks in a deep breath. Lets his belly surge out into Shiro’s when he sighs it out. Urging his forehead back up into Shiro’s, he pleads, “Tell me about it. Help me learn. I’m not afraid, Sable!”

“Oh, you _should_ be. And if you aren’t afraid by the time I’m done with you? I won’t have done my job.”

Keith shivers. Sets his beautiful belly shaking all over, quivering right up on Shiro’s muscles, where he can feel every undulation—

“You want to know what it means to submit to a feeder, Akira? To release your every inhibition and let me call the shots for you?” Nodding knocks Keith’s forehead on Shiro’s, but he doesn’t flinch. He only chuckles, brushing his thumb down Keith’s cheek. “You want to know what it means to let yourself go? To unleash any glutton you might be hiding, deep in your unconscious mind? To gain so much weight and keep getting fatter until there’s no chance you can come back from it—not like you’d _want_ to lose that weight again, assuming you ever _could_?”

Inhaling sharply, Keith nods again. “God, _please_, Sable, I want that so much…”

“How do you _know_ what you want? You’ve never been a fat-boy. Not like what I’m thinking.”

Shiro huffs and edges away from Keith. He tugs Keith with him, over to the center camera, then slips behind him. Nestling close to Keith’s back, he splays his hands over Keith’s middle and fights down a gasp as he sinks his palms into the warm mound of Keith’s flesh.

As he rubs up on Keith’s body, as he nuzzles at the back of Keith’s skull and pinches up handfuls of that belly, he forces his breaths to stay slow and deep and even. Gets himself sledgehammered with the fruity, spicy stench of Keith’s shampoo—but it’s okay. An acceptable side-effect of this proximity, of relishing in having Keith here and having his arms around Keith’s body. Maybe the noise that Shiro lets slip sounds like a growl. Or a snarl. Something animalistic and rough, demanding and hard, dominant and little else. Nothing soft or besotted or romantic or starry-eyed. Nothing to suggest that Shiro doesn’t know how to handle himself around a pretty boy with a gorgeous belly, much less one who deserves everything he wants.

Maybe. God, Shiro hopes he’s pulling this off. He hopes that nipping at Keith’s ear looks like he’s staking a claim.

“Any boy who’d want me for a feeder would need to get _huge_—”

“But I _want_ to get huge—”

“You have _no idea_ what it means to be huge, Akira.” Shiro rolls his hips against Keith’s ass. He pads around Keith’s belly, kneads Keith’s stomach between his hands like Blue does when she has a mind to play with her humans’ flesh. “Chubby, sure. You understand that—”

“Then help me understand! Why do you think I’m coming to you—”

“Why _would_ you come to me? You haven’t brought me proof that you _really_ want to gain—”

“I lost three pounds this week, Sable! That’s why I need your help, I can’t do this without you…”

Shiro chuckles, a dry, mirthless sound. “That sounds like a lack of resolve. Loss of commitment. Maybe you’re wishing that you’d never put on any weight to start with?” As Keith desperately shakes his head, Shiro _thwack!_s his belly. Leaning right on Keith’s ear, he drawls, “Get yourself on a diet and head back to the gym, Tubby. You don’t have what it takes to be a fat-boy. You _barely_ have what it takes to be someone’s feedee.” He tuts. Ghosts his lips up the edge of Keith’s ear. Jiggles Keith’s belly with both hands. “Might as well give up and lose this gut before you dig yourself an even bigger hole.”

“That’s what I _want_, why don’t you _believe_ me!” Groaning like he could put his fist through a window and think nothing of it, Keith pushes back. Grinds his ass on Shiro’s hips like he’s daring Shiro to feel every thick, quivering inch of flesh that he has on him. “I don’t want to lose the weight again, you idiot. I don’t _care_ how big you want to get me ‘cause I have _no limits_.” Keith’s breath hitches in his throat—but is it from his concentrated rubbing on Shiro? Or is it from the way that Shiro shoves his chub back into him, hands effectively acting as Keith’s girdle? “Get me so fat, you have to push my belly out of the way to _see_ my cock. So far, you have to hold my belly to get me off—”

“What makes you think that I would be the one to get you off, though?” Shiro tries to put a knife’s-edge glinting in his laugh. He nudges the hem of Keith’s shirt up to his natural waist and curls his fingers tight around Keith’s lower belly. “Show a little initiative. Put your hand around your own cock, if you want an orgasm so badly.”

“I won’t be able to, though. Not when you’re done with me.” Keith inhales sharply, deeply. He rolls back against Shiro so easily, so slowly, giving up a little _“who? me? I really didn’t mean to” _huff—and Shiro can’t help a biting laugh because Keith knows exactly what he’s doing. “Sable, please… There’s no one else who can give me what I _need_—”

“What is that, Baby?” Shiro nibbles on Keith’s earlobe. He sucks on Keith’s pudgy jaw with the full intent to give him a hickey. He stops short of that, but only because they have another shoot tomorrow, and right up on the wet spot, he whispers, “Tell me what you need.”

“I need to be _enormous_,” comes out of Keith like a prayer. “I need to be so big, I can’t put shoes on by myself. So huge,. So big and fat that I feel hungry when I’m less than stuffed to bursting. Such a tub of lard that all I think about is eating, food, and _you_.” He rocks on Shiro, rubs on him so well that Shiro has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from getting hard. “Make me as fat as you want, Sable. I don’t care, as long as you make me _yours_.”

_Yours_… Shiro turns that word over in his head. He repeats it, lips against Keith’s skin and hands venturing lower and lower, massaging every centimeter of Keith’s beautiful, plump flesh. Skirting his fingers along Keith’s crotch—brushing them over the erection straining at Keith’s shorts—Shiro allows himself to smile. Maybe he lets his eyes go too dewy and too soft; he won’t know until he’s editing things later. But Keith’s so amazing and honestly, who could help themself from appreciating that?

Who could feel Keith writhing in their arms and deny that Keith is something that no one else can ever be? Who could feel the way his love-handles squish and crunch as he wriggles around and pretend that Keith is anything less than perfect? Who could get their hands all over the soft, pliant flesh of Keith’s belly, rock their hips into his full, plush ass, and grope at every roll of flab he’s packed onto his once-compact frame—and restrain themself from smiling like Keith is the center of the universe and the single most beautiful thing that lives inside it?

No one could resist that impulse. Because Keith is everything that anyone could want.

With a kiss to Keith’s shoulder and a firm shake of his belly, Shiro purrs, “You really want that, Baby?”

“God, Sable, please… More than anything I—”

“You want me to stuff you and stuff you, ‘til you think you can’t eat any more—”

“_Fuck_ yeah—”

“And then shove even more food down your greedy maw—”

“That’s _all _I want, Sable—”

“You want to _explode_ with fat? Really blubber out, ballooning faster than you can believe—”

Keith gasps, moans as his hips buck toward Shiro’s hand. “_Jesus_, Sable, why can’t you just—”

“Do you want me to give you everything I have and more,” Shiro drawls, squishing Keith’s chub and palming at his rock-hard cock. He tries to tune out Keith’s frantic nodding, tries to focus on massaging his belly. “Do you want me to help you grow out of new clothes as soon as you size up into them. Expand your chunky thighs until they’re totally encased in your plumped up, jiggly, sagging blubber. Turn this little belly you’ve gained into a real, proper, huge, fat _gut_. Do you want me to push every limit you think you have, get you bigger than you’ve ever imagined—”

Squirming, dragging his ass along Shiro’s crotch, Keith bites out, “I want you to stop _teasing me_ and make good on that already—”

“Do you want me,” he whispers, hot and heavy against Keith’s ear, “to fatten you up further than anybody else could go? To turn you into a massive, fleshy tub of lard, so consumed and turned on by your own lack of self-control that you can’t even help yourself from gaining more weight? More and more and more, maxing out every scale that you come across? Getting so big that you make baby whales feel skinny?”

Taking a deep breath, he clutches at Keith’s belly. Hold him in place and grinds hard against his luscious, yielding, chubby ass. Lets a groan slip out and fights down a gasp as Keith shudders so hard that every inch of his plump stomach quivers.

Shiro presses another kiss to Keith’s jaw. “Do you wanna get so fat, Akira, that all you ever do is stuff your greedy face with food, and laze around, growing even fatter for me, and get off on the sheer, wanton depths of your own gluttony?”

Keith moans. Tries to bite out real words, like the grown-ups they’re supposed to be. All he manages to do is nod. But that’s okay. It’s good enough. With an indulgent sigh, Shiro gives Keith’s belly one more squeeze.

“First thing that needs to go? Your inhibitions.” Jostling Keith’s chub, he promises, “I’ve got an idea that just might work.”

* * *

Nominally, getting the vibrator in shouldn’t take as long as Keith spends on it. But he knows what he’s doing—and he knows better than to rush through something like this. Aside from the fact that they’ll need as much footage as they can get, he relishes in the process of working himself open, lubing himself up and finger-fucking his own hole… Moaning so loudly that Shiro _has_ to hear him, and God, Keith hopes he does. Hell, the neighbors might hear him, too.

As long as they don’t actually call in a noise complaint with the super, though, there’s no sense in holding back. Worming his fingers in deeper, Keith throws his head back and pushes his belly out toward the camera. He pulls up the most guttural sounds he can when the vibe finally comes into play, when he pushes it into himself and tightens around it… Shiro’s cock would be infinitely preferable—not that this vibe has ever done Keith wrong, and he’s the one who suggested that they bring it into this clip—but still, he wants to get Shiro inside of him and vice versa. He wants to _know_ Shiro in the only way they haven’t known each other yet: Biblically.

Maybe Keith’s come for Shiro, but Shiro’s never come for Keith, not where Keith could _see_ him do it, not where Keith could _feel_ him shuddering as pleasure wracks his body—the mere thought of that’s enough to make pre-come start leaking from Keith’s hot, aching cock. Since he’s working himself over for the camera anyway, he sighs and curls a hand around his shaft. He can’t go too far—once he gets out into the apartment, it’s not his call on when he gets to find release—but he jerks himself once… Twice… He bites his lip and whimpers, _“Sable, please” _to the otherwise empty room…

_What if Shiro doesn’t really want this… What if he isn’t… He might not… What if I’m_—

Digging his teeth even harder into his lip, Keith bucks his hips, fucks into his hand. His fingers don’t usually feel like they’ve gained any weight, but maybe they’re softer than they have been. Maybe he isn’t imagining that they feel softer and pudgier around his cock. Maybe that’s _real_, unlike the anxiety about whether or not Shiro wants him back, which is entirely in Keith’s own head. He’s reading too much into things. Making a mountain out of the fact that they haven’t had orgasms with each other when they’ve only been co-stars for a few weeks and they’ve only been boyfriends since _yesterday morning_—

Pinching up a roll of his own belly-chub, Keith rocks his hips, nudges the vibe around inside him. The plug on the end keeps him from losing track of it. Keeps him from needing one of the humiliating ER visits that you read about in click-bait articles about the weirdest things that nurses have pulled out of patients’ rectums. Fuck, with his and Shiro’s collective luck? Sven would be on shift right now. He’d be the one to take them into a room and he’d have to listen, pretending to be objective as his cousin explained what the Hell he and Keith had been doing and why they’re over at Mercy together—

Thank God for thoughts like that. They don’t take back Keith’s erection, don’t make him lose it—but as he jerks himself one last time, it’s that much easier to hold off on how much he wants to _come_. Sucking in a deep breath should be business as usual. Nothing unexpected. A quick inhale that leads to a sigh and simply a side-effect of the way Keith’s moving, the way his vibe is nudging around, probing deeper and deeper into him, finding that sweet spot as if it has its own mind and knows exactly what Keith _doesn’t need right now_—

Until the chill slams into Keith like a runaway fucking mack truck. Hits him deep, right in the pit of his lungs, and makes him shiver so hard that his entire belly wobbles. It shakes like someone’s smacked him, as if he’s got Shiro’s hands all over him again, grabbing him and making his flesh jerk and jiggle. His meaty chest trembles. Even his thighs quiver, crowding in on each other and wracked with the impact as Keith force himself to keep breathing, tries to keep his cool, tries to keep his head right here, in the present moment, in the reality where Shiro is his boyfriend and loves him and there’s no reason for him to start coughing. No reason for—

Except the coughs charge up out of him, harder than a stampede and ten times as self-insistent. Abandoning his cock, Keith uses one hand to brace himself on the bed—goddammit, he’ll need to change his sheets when they’re done, he can’t handle knowing that he’s smeared lube and mess all over them—and buries his mouth in the crook of his other elbow. Once the hacking starts, there’s no way he can stop it. None that he’s ever learned in nearly twenty years of getting these goddamn flare-ups. None that wouldn’t end up being worse for him than simply letting the Hanahaki take its course and play itself out however it wants.

Thankfully, the coughing doesn’t last that long. On the other hand, he comes up with a decently-sized heap of petals. Before he even catches a glimpse of them falling everywhere, he knows what he’ll see. Who else would make him cough so hard, so deep, so much? As he lets them drop to the mattress, he counts three of the fully-formed black roses that Shiro induces in more people than he’s ever allowed himself to realize.

“Fucking idiot,” Keith grumbles, combing his clean hand back through his hair, pushing his bangs off his forehead. “God, I love him, but come on.”

Which is probably all that he can currently get away with saying. He’s already breaking character over this unexpected flare-up, and they’re going to end up losing some of this ending material, the shots of Keith wriggling back into his shorts and tugging his shirt down into place. It’s not easy to make things look seamless and natural when there’s an abrupt interruption and a pile of goth trash rose petals sitting on the bed-sheets that distinctly were not there beforehand. Maybe they won’t miss out on much, _but still_. Losing any material over obnoxious, pesky bullshit like Hanahaki disease is annoying and wrong on _principle_.

Peeling himself off the bed, he glances over at this full-length mirror… Okay, he looks alright. Pretty good. Flushed and red and eager, chubby cheeks all lit up like fireworks. His cock strains against the fabric covering his crotch and his belly strains harder still against the shirt that’s trying to contain it. He’s good to go, ready to work.

Only two things left that he needs: first, Keith needs to find _some_ way he can break this news to Shiro that doesn’t end in him trying to call off the entire shoot. Second, he picks up one of the blossoms, just in case Shiro tries to deny what’s going on and hide from the reality of this, tries to pretend like Keith might have a Hanahaki flare-up over literally anyone else right now, and tries to deny how beloved he is like a _fucking idiot_.

Unfortunately for the first item on that list, Shiro swoops in on the door as soon as Keith wanders out. His hand finds its way to Keith’s shoulder, which could be fitting for Sable under certain circumstances—except that Shiro’s eyes are too wide and soft for him to be anything but his completely authentic self. Watching Keith’s face like putting him under a magnifying glass, Shiro calls a temporary _“yellow”_ and squeezes Keith’s shoulder gingerly, as if he’s afraid of breaking something.

_Literally why would you be afraid of that _**_now_**_? After how much time we’ve spent in each other’s lives?_—Keith doesn’t allow himself to roll his eyes, much less say what he’s thinking. As always, Shiro means well, and in all likelihood, these words would only hurt his feelings for no constructive point—_You know good and goddamn well that I’m not some fragile little porcelain doll, Kashi_—

“Baby, please,” Shiro whispers, voice heavy with significance. “I heard you all the way out here. Are you okay?”

Shaking his head, Keith holds up the flower. “You wanna guess how many cases this makes?”

For a moment, all Shiro does is blink at the rose, eyes wide and cheeks turning redder than the azaleas that he coughs up for Keith. His mouth falls open, and shaking his head doesn’t seem to help him regain his mental footing. When he tries to move his lips in any way that vaguely resembles human speech, he can’t get out a single syllable. It’s like his throat has closed up on itself, or like his voice has fucked off to Narnia and taken his ability to control his tongue along for the ride.

Finally, Shiro gives up on speaking. Runs one hand’s fingers through his bangs and shoves the other one’s thumb through his belt-loop. He settles into gaping at the telltale blossom with a glimmer that Keith sure as Hell hopes is recognition because if it’s _not_? Then he might give in to this acute, burning, raw temptation and scream enough bloody murder that their neighbors skip filing a noise complaint and call the fucking cops.

(That thought makes him chuckle grimly before he can think better of it. Sadly, he and Shiro have had more _interesting_ misadventures than explaining themselves to the cops while they’re in the middle of shooting kinky amateur porn. It would, however, be exactly their fucking luck for this to happen.)

Shiro heaves a deep sigh. Then, he winces because fuck’s sakes, he shouldn’t be heaving _any_ kind of sighs while he’s as Hanahaki-riddled as he is right now. Of course it hurts. His lungs are overtaxed enough, and that extra force behind Shiro’s breaths will do him no favors. At least he recovers quickly enough. As he tucks his white fringe behind his ear, he’s even starting to rein in the blush that’s spilled all over his pretty face.

“Uh… D’you mean, like…” Shiro squirms, scratching at the back of his neck. “I promise, I’m only asking because I don’t follow and I want to answer the right question. So, do you mean that as in how many flare-ups you’ve had in general, over your entire life? Or maybe over a set period within your entire life?” He takes a deep breath, swallows it instead of sighing again, and looks Keith in the eye. “Or do you mean how many flare-ups you’ve had over me specifically?”

“The last one.” Keith doesn’t _try_ to glare at Shiro. He actively tries _not_ to grimace, because he loves his boyfriend and he understands that Shiro can be more sensitive than he wants most people to realize. But as he bats the black rose at Shiro’s nose, Keith stares him down and arches both brows expectantly. “Do you know. How many times. I have coughed up. These fucking Hot Topic clearance sale, Emilie Autumn B-sides album, Sisters of Mercy live tracks and rarities collection, bottom of the garbage can by a Siouxsie and the Banshees mosh-pit. Goth. Trash. Fucking. Roses. For you. _Shiro_.”

“Uh…” Shiro’s cheeks flush fire engine red again. Which would be adorable in pretty much any other context, but currently makes Keith force a smile so hard, it feels like his face might rip in half. “I think, like… If I… I don’t want to be, like? I’m not saying that you aren’t—or that you would literally ever do like what I’m—because I _don’t_ think that, and I _do_ trust you—and I love you _so, _**_so_** much, Keith, but I’m not really—”

Getting bopped on the nose again makes him whine, but he seems to calm himself rocking up onto his toes, then back onto his heels. Following Keith’s lead, he fumbles through a series of deep, slow breaths. After three, his hands stop trembling. After six, he’s on an even enough keel that he nods for

“I feel like if I say my real answer, you might feel hurt?” Shiro grins apologetically and slouches at the hips. “Then, you might get mad?”

Keith’s shoulders droop and his eyebrow jerks up. “Are you guessing that this is my first time?”

Cringing, Shiro nods.

Keith closes his eyes and counts to ten. Then, to fifteen, just for safety.

Locking on to Shiro’s face, he swats his idiot’s nose with the flower one more time.

“Try more like my _twenty-fourth_ time.” He smirks as Shiro’s mouth flops open again. “Yeah. Exactly.”

“But I… But you? How did I—”

“You didn’t _want_ to see it, Shiro. There were plenty of times when I had it for you? And you thought I had it for Hunk. Or Allura. Or _Zethrid._”

“I mean, platonic Hanahaki happens, though? And you really love them, too—”

“Of course I really love them! The issue is _not_ how much I did or didn’t love anyone—”

“No, I get it, okay? The issue is that I didn’t even _consider_ that you might have… That you would literally ever… Not like I, or that I could really, or that we’d maybe, I don’t know?” Scrunching his face up, Shiro huffs and quirks his shoulders. “The issue is that clearly, I’m an _idiot_. There were so many times when I could’ve noticed or done something different. But I kept, like…”

Jesus, listening to him babble like this hurts more than getting smacked in the forehead with a brick.

Before he can stop himself, Keith sighs. Wincing from the pain makes Shiro worry his fingers through Keith’s hair and trail his long, beautiful fingers down Keith’s face. This is the part where Keith should look his boyfriend in the eye and say something smart, and poignant, and suitably frustrated but very much in love—except he can’t lift his head. As Shiro cups his hand around Keith’s cheek, he leans into the touch without a word. Even silently yelling at himself to figure his own shit out and give Shiro _something_ he can react to—_something_ that might help make any of this situation better, or at least make it suck less—all Keith manages to do is kiss Shiro’s palm.

“I like your hands,” he says as though this explains literally anything.

“They’re all yours, Baby,” Shiro tells him. “For as long as you want them.”

“Of course I want them, what are you even—” Keith huffs, finally managing to meet Shiro’s gaze. Yeah, Keith’s stomach churns and gooseflesh crops up along the back of his neck—but this is important. Keith_ needs_ to make sure that Shiro gets this through his head already. “Would it make you feel better if I told you that I understand why you didn’t notice?”

“Not really? I’m more concerned with how _you’re_ doing about this—”

“I’ll be fine, Shiro. I’ve done this so many times before.” Huffing softly, Keith nuzzles at Shiro’s hand. “Anyway, it’s not like this is new for me. I don’t know how long I’ve been in love with a guy who doesn’t see how great he is. Who didn’t think I’d love him back—”

“Because I used to be fat.” Shiro blushes and hunches in on himself like he recognizes how stupid this idea sounds. “That’s not completely… I knew that you wouldn’t have been, like… You’re not that shallow, I mean? And that isn’t all of what went on for me beforehand, but then?” Shrugging, he doesn’t bother to fake a smile. Thank God. “It _was_ a not-insignificant reason for why I, y’know…”

Keith feels like a bottle of Coke, getting shaken up and left to stew when he wants to explode. But he somehow keeps himself from sighing as he tells Shiro, “As long as you promise to keep working on those feelings, Babe? And to keep telling yourself how _wrong_ they are?”

“It’s harder than it sounds, okay?” Shiro ducks his chin guiltily. “Because some of them _aren’t_ as garbage as they sound—nothing about you.” He squeezes Keith’s cheek. “More the things, like… Knowing how much people used to stare at me. And how much they used to talk… The sorts of things they’d say about me, or try to pretend that they weren’t saying, or openly say because they were so _concerned_, even if they didn’t know me… And going through that sucks, so I didn’t want to subject you—”

“Fuck it, Shiro. Let them talk.”

The words bubble up and burst out of Keith before he realizes that they’re coming. Above him, Shiro lets slip a confused, throaty little sound. So, Keith edges all the way into his personal space. Bumping his pudge into Shiro’s abs and his aching cock against Shiro’s hips, Keith allows himself to moan, even though he’s playing it up. Unable to stop himself, he smirks fondly at the way his boyfriend squeaks.

“I _want_ to hear them talk about us. I want to hear them go on about why the Hell a skinny, shredded drink of water like you would ever wanna be with a fat-ass pig like me. I love the thought of people staring, Babe. The thought of them gawking when you kiss me. Of how much we could scandalize them if you took me out to a buffet…” Kissing Shiro’s collarbone, Keith grins. He puts on a dark voice to tell his boy, “It _really_ turns me on.”

Judging from the way that Shiro shudders, Keith guesses that his boyfriend might be coming around to see his point of view.

* * *

Keith is amazing. Watching him work is amazing. Everything about the situation—everything about _Keith, himself_, and watching him charge into a fourteen-slice pizza on his own, and listening to him moan—Shiro _can_ believe this? He’s seen enough of how Keith works that none of it terribly surprises him anymore. But what did he do to get so lucky?

That’s the question and as he sits on the coffee-table, Shiro has no answers for it. He has Keith, though. Keith, who sits sprawled out on the sofa, splaying his thick, flabby thighs as wide as they’ll go… Arching his back with every huge bite of pizza that he scarfs down, puffing up his chubby cheeks with how much food he shoves into his mouth until he looks like a chipmunk… Pushing his pudgy stomach toward the cameras in front of him, writhing as he attacks his first oversized slice and moaning around it more than is entirely necessary, twitching his hips to make his chub wobble and shake because he won’t be able to do this—at least not with any semblance of comfort—when he’s all good and stuffed…

Jesus, they’re _working_ and Shiro needs to stay in character. Still, though, no one could _blame_ Shiro for the fact that he loves to watch Keith work… Or for the fact that he loves to watch Keith eat… If he gets a little bit enraptured as Keith goes to town on the first two slices, then is that _honestly_ a failing, on his part? Shiro’s pretty sure it’s not.

Then again, as he watches Keith taking smaller bites of his second slice, Shiro’s pretty sure that something’s up. He can’t _seriously_ be lagging… There’s no way, not with how much Keith can eat and how mindlessly he goes at his food… He’s _barely_ getting started—and he is arching an eyebrow _ever so pointedly_, as if elbowing Shiro in the stomach to remind him of something he was supposed to do. But what was he—

Shiro glances down at the remote in his hand. He brushes his thumb up the warm, red plastic.

Right. He’s the dom today. For this clip, at least. Which has certain responsibilities and certain tasks he needs to see done—

“What’d I tell you about _slowing down_.” Huffing, Shiro doesn’t wait for Keith’s answer; he just flicks the switch.

Immediately, Keith’s face spasms. He scrunches it up into an expression that’s more or less illegible, mixed between delight and frustration. Or exasperation, maybe. Groaning, gasping, he rocks his hips toward Shiro—he squirms and pulls his stomach in as tight as he can still manage—and when Shiro turns the vibrator off, Keith flops back into the sofa. The hand that isn’t holding a slice goes down toward his crotch—

Shiro hits the switch again, quirking an eyebrow and pursing his lips like, _“Well, what did you expect to happen?”_—and God, his heart twists guiltily, watching Keith writhe and listening to him moan… He must be red-hot and rock-hard, at this point. If Shiro got his mouth around Keith’s cock right now, it likely wouldn’t take too much work to get him off. He’d be so sensitive to touch, so receptive to everything, so ready to explode from the slightest pleasurable contact—but that isn’t how things get to go tonight.

“Remember what the rules are, Baby?” Shiro flips his white fringe off his face and tries to pull his face into a sneer. Mostly, it ends up hurting. “I’m serious: do you remember what the rules are? Because I’m starting to doubt your commitment to following them…”

Cameras or no cameras, Shiro cringes at how he sounds. His voice might not be cold enough. Not harsh enough. Not bone marrow-frozen enough to really play up the hard dom character that Sable’s supposedly projecting in this clip. Clearing his throat, he likely comes off too politely, or like he has no idea what he wants, much less how to handle a situation like the one that, in character, he has engineered.

For Keith’s part, well… He hasn’t safe-worded out yet? Which is something positive, Shiro guesses. But as he reaches for his fourth slice of pizza, Keith arches both eyebrows at Shiro. Not judgmentally, exactly? But with a distinct air like, _“I’m starting to doubt your commitment to domming me harder than an a diamond, Babe.”_

God, Shiro feels like a fumbling virgin all over again. Except this is fifty-thousand times worse, because he and Adam didn’t _expect_ each other to have the first clue what they were into sexually, when they slept together after junior prom. Maybe he reaffirms that, on the inside, he never entirely outgrew one piece of his high school experience. Maybe he remains more goth trash than a Hot Topic clearance sale, but he tries to remember the deep groove of Depeche Mode’s _“Master And Servant”_—possibly not the _best_ pick, given that it’s written from the submissive’s point of view…

But as he plays the tune in his head, Shiro manages to inhale deeply and fix his posture like he’s had a rod shoved up his spine. He rolls his shoulders back, getting the closest to military attention that he can while sitting on a coffee-table, and he tilts his head back so that he can only look down his nose at Keith. _I know what I’m doing. I’m the one who’s in control here. Akira only gets his pleasure when I say that he can have it—_

“Rules are so _lame_, though, Sable. What kind of glutton follows _rules_? Aren’t you supposed to be teaching me about _wanton, greedy hedonism_?” When he gets no answer, Keith rolls his eyes and shoves the rest of his slice into his mouth. Starting on number five, he gives Shiro a Pointed Look that _begs_ him to retaliate—

God, Keith’s trying to play the brat, trying to egg Shiro on and goad him into doing better—and all that Shiro’s thinking? Is that Keith’s lips are beautiful and it’s a travesty that Shiro isn’t kissing them right here, right now, damn their work and damn the job they need to do.

“What’m I supposed to learn about hedonism by sticking to a _code_? Or about letting go by _playing safe_—”

“They’re _my_ rules, Akira!” Shiro’s face burns as soon as the words snap out of him. He has no idea how he keeps his shoulders from hunching in around him. No idea how he narrows his eyes instead of gaping at Keith. “Moreover, they’re the rules that _you_ agreed to follow? You know, so you could prove that you’re committed, and dedicated, and strong enough to keep up with me?”

“Starting to wonder if _you_ can keep up with _me_—”

“_I’m _not the one who has anything to prove to his partner.”

By way of emphasizing this—as if he’s making _any_ point, beyond how much he sucks at playing the dom—Shiro flicks the vibe on once again. He intends to go for just a short burst—barely enough of motion for Keith to gasp and moan and start squirming with _need, fuck, want, God, Sable, please_—but God, once Keith starts writhing? Once he starts tensing up, flailing his legs, kicking idly at Shiro’s ankles, and the table, and the hardwood floor? Wow, he can’t help himself… He literally cannot do anything to stop his body from reacting how it will—or, if he can, then Keith clearly has no interest in that.

Shiro smirks. Coughs up a dry little chuckle. Yeah… Yeah, he could stand to let Keith keep going for a while.

“If you will recall, Akira, _you_ are the one who bears the burden of proof,” he purrs, combing his free hand back through his white fringe, easing it off his face _so slowly_ because he doesn’t _need_ to care how much this turns Keith on—just so long as Keith doesn’t allow himself to come. “Of the two of us, you’re the one who needs to prove that you aren’t simply a jumped-up chubby boy with delusions of grandeur and desires too big for you to fully handle. You’re the one who needs to show _me_ that you truly _deserve_ my efforts to help you gain—”

“If you even _can_ help me,” Keith bites out, voice straining around obvious arousal.

“Strong words for someone who came and sought me out, chasing a privileged position as my new feedee.” Shiro turns the vibe off again and lowers his chin so he can glare at Keith. “You _do_ remember what you agreed to when we began this little adventure, don’t you.”

God help him, Shiro almost lets himself give in for the frantic way Keith nods. Not just breaking character, either: he almost lets himself slip up and forego the game entirely. Almost forgets what he and Keith are playing at, what the entire arousal factor’s meant to be in this clip and the story that they cooked up for it. _No, no, can’t do that… Curl the lips tighter, sit up straighter, pull your abs in so your profile-view will have an even more pronounced difference from his… Chin up, voice cold, eyes clear, can’t forget who calls the shots and can’t let Keith forget that either—_

Tutting, Shiro stares pointedly at the slice that Keith still has his hand on. “Finish that and tell me what the rules are. In your own words, if you would be so kind.”

Slice number five practically evaporates into Keith’s mouth. It might be too much, too fast. He doesn’t groan from discomfort, doesn’t reach to rub his belly—but Keith’s entire face is an even darker shade of red than the azaleas that he’s sown in Shiro’s lungs. He’s almost wheezing, breathing heavily like no one’s business, gasping for air, almost like he’s—

“You know, I was under the impression that it was the Big Bad Wolf who huffed and puffed and blew down little piggies’ houses.” When this earns Shiro a scrunched up, bemused expression, he shrugs like he has no idea what Keith wants him to say. “What? With a little belly like that, there’s no way that you could be the wolf, Akira. None whatsoever. You might not deserve to call yourself a full-blown pig, yet—but you’re well on your way, aren’t you? Anyway, you won’t stay away from that label for long, if I have my way.”

Keith’s cheeks flush even brighter. He squirms. Makes himself moan—God, he must’ve knocked the vibe around inside himself. Must’ve gotten it to go a bit too hard or a bit too deep, even though it isn’t turned on. Watching him gasp and heave deeper breaths, wriggling around the cushions and trying to find a more comfortable position that he can sit in, an arrangement of his body that won’t shove his face quite so hard into the stimulation that he’s getting and the agreement that—

“_Hold on_,” Shiro says and clicks his tongue. He sniffs in the same way that Lotor does when he’s about to dismiss someone’s idea as obviously bad and stupid. “You _did_ promise me that you could control yourself enough _not_ to come. Do you intend to break that promise, Akira?”

Shaking his head, Keith tries to say something—but he can’t get any words past the guttural moan that crawls out of him.

“_Good_ boy,” Shiro intones. Allows himself to smile and lets his eyes go soft. This isn’t wrong. He isn’t ruining the game or spoiling the clip or breaking character. No, Maurice used to offer him similar praise when he was doing well, when he was holding off exactly as they’d agreed he would—_oh, wait! Maurice! _**_Obviously_**_!_

Trying to keep his face neutral—trying _not_ to betray the miraculous insight he’s scored for himself—Shiro brushes his bare foot up Keith’s equally naked, pale, yielding, pudgy calf. He hums as though he’s actually thinking about anything—anything beyond how beautiful Keith looks, with his belly already pressing out against his shirt, sticking out further than it did before he started eating, rounding out and bulging closer to his lap—and he lets himself give Keith another smile. Fond and warm, open and earnest and utterly in love with Keith… Shiro can slip back into Sable’s harder aspect in a moment. _After_ Keith’s been reminded that Shiro loves him.

“You _are_ doing so well for me, Akira,” he promises. “You _know_ that I only use the stick to teach you better, right? Metaphorically speaking, I mean.”

Briefly, Keith shoots him a flat, unimpressed expression. Slouching, he lets his eyes glaze over as if this conversation has become a tedious formality with someone he can’t stand but has been forced to tolerate. _“Like you even _**_have_**_ a literal stick right now,” _he seems to say.

Prompting him one more time makes Keith sigh—which, in turn, makes him wince—but he nods that he’s ready to say what Shiro wants to hear.

“I don’t stop eating until I’m ready to be sick.” Keith blows on the bangs flopping a bit too low on his forehead, then gives up and shakes them off his face instead. The motion sends ripples down his chubby chest, right to the fullest part of his belly and _oh, God_, he’s beautiful. But he goes on before Shiro can get too caught up in staring at him: “I’m not allowed to come until I finish one whole pizza by myself. Belly rubs, yes, but only when _you_ decide that I can have one. If you think I’m slowing down—or if I talk back to you, or if I do anything that’s out of line for the fat-boy that we’re making me into—then you turn on the vibrator.”

Shiro gives Keith a hum and a nod. “Do you remember _why_ I use the vibe with you, Baby?”

“Because it’s a pretty goddamn reliable way of turning someone on? And since I can’t come until I’m done stuffing myself with an entire extra-large pie, that’s a pretty fitting punishment? Getting me even more keyed up than I would be anyway?” Keith grins triumphantly when Shiro gives him another nod—then slumps back and groans when Shiro blinks at him as if to remind Keith that he’s waiting. “What, seriously? There’s literally any other reason for this _aside_ from taking the chance to punish me for not eating fast enough?”

“Indeed, there is. Namely: operant conditioning.” 

“Pretty fancy way of saying that you’re a _freeeeaaa_—” Keith cuts himself off, groaning as the vibe goes to work inside him.

“What did you _just_ say about back-talk.”

Keith wriggles. Moans. Sniffing, Shiro quirks his eyebrow.

“I can wait all day for an answer, Baby. The question is: can _you_—”

“No back-talk! No back-talk! Sable, _please_!”

When the vibe flicks off, Keith collapses into the cushions. Goes limp, as if his bones have turned to jello. But down in his crotch: he’s leaking pre-come but still hard. Once he’s got some semblance of his breath back, he allows himself to sigh. He winces too much to hide or edit out. Thank God his clients will likely chalk it up to the stuffing, instead of guessing Hanahaki.

Except _that_ thought makes Shiro’s cheeks flush pink. Keith has had _twenty-two _Hanahaki flare-ups over _him_—

Ducking his chin, Shiro turns away from as many cameras as he can. Some will get a decent shot of his back, despite the fact that he’s still clothed. Others might get a nice profile-view, which could emphasize the contrast between the rolls and bulges of Keith’s pudgy belly and Shiro’s more or less flat, washboard abs. But he can’t let them get too good a shot of his face right now. Even as he hands Keith a seventh slice, Shiro keeps his head down. Tries to hide his very un-dom-like blushing.

“In a sense? Operant conditioning is a way of positive reinforcement.”

Not the best or most accurate explanation that Shiro could’ve given Keith. But it works well enough, for these purposes. As long as Shiro keeps his head about him. To which end, he sucks in a deep breath. Then, a second. Shiro sets his jaw and hopes like Hell that he’s pulling off a dark, lustful set of bedroom eyes. He is looking at Keith, watching him cram the pizza into his mouth at breakneck pace. Giving him a besotted expression would be so _easy_, but Shiro can_not_ allow himself to falter. Not when Keith needs him to get through this.

One more round of breathing slowly—“When you eat like you’re supposed to? Like a _good_ little piggy?” Shiro chuckles. “I do this.”

He flicks the switch again. Smirks as Keith moans. It could be from the pizza or the vibe. Who knows? More importantly: who _cares_? Keith’s face screws up in pleasure, blushing red all over again. His legs knock into Shiro’s while they flail. An exhortation to keep going makes him nod, makes him finish off the slice. As if it helps to make a point that Shiro might not even have, he lets the vibe keep going for another couple seconds.

Then, it goes off and Keith topples back again.

“What’s that do?” He gasps and shoots Shiro a knife’s edge smirk, trying to maintain this bratty façade, despite not really having his breath back. Despite not really feeling that character choice—and _God_, Keith’s hair falls over his face, brushes over his full, flushed cheeks. As he nods and takes slice number eight, Keith asks again, “What’s the whole game here, Sable?”

“Training your brain.” Chuckling, Shiro flicks the switch, but turns the vibe off before it can do too much of its work. “The vibe helps you learn to associate eating with pleasure. Makes you get more into it. We do it over—” Another switch on. Shiro counts to ten, then turns it off.

“And over—” Glaring at Shiro in borderline-defiance, Keith shoves a good half of the slice into his mouth. Shiro only arches his brows.

“And _over_—” Giving Keith a pensive hum, Shiro turns the vibrator back on. Keith’s moans nag at his ears, this time. They hit Shiro’s heart like a brick slamming into his face. Still, if the point is drawing out the pleasure… “Keep eating, Baby.”

Shiro doesn’t give the vibe a rest until Keith’s licking the grease off of his fingers.

Even flopping back into the couch, he keeps slipping them into his mouth. Sucking on them like a vampire. Moaning while he goes to work, then throwing in these beautiful, horrid little popping sounds as he takes them out. All up, making Shiro’s stomach tie itself in knots that might never come undone. Making him think like, _God, I wish that were me_.

Trying not to dwell on that—trying not to lose himself and forget which character he’s supposed to play—Shiro hands over Keith’s ninth slice of the pizza. It goes down quickly, as does number ten. Neither one earns him too many hits from the vibe. Sure, Shiro throws them in there for the sake of Sable’s ruse—never mind the sake of watching Keith writhe, hearing him moan, listening to his increasingly desperate, breathy little gasps when Shiro tuts and reminds him not to touch his own cock—but none of these rounds go on very long. Barely a few seconds, each. Which earns Shiro a crack about how he’s gonna kill the batteries if he’s not careful, but he insists that he has reasons for the way that he’s doing things.

“You care to tell me what they are?” Keith needles, taking his first bite of slice number eleven.

With a faux-pensive huff, Shiro gives up a shrug. “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see, if you keep eating.”

As Keith gets that slice down, though, Shiro mentally rehashes his _real _reasons. He might need to make up some in-character rationale, sure—but as he clicks his tongue to warn Keith off of rubbing his bloated tummy? As he listens to Keith whimper around his pizza? Shiro definitely needs to remember why he decided on this plan.

For one thing, overloading Keith with the vibrator could easily take things out of the realm of _pleasure_, into the realm of _pain_. Not the kind of pain that hurts so good, either. The kind of pain that might make Keith use a safe-word and lose all taste for doing this ever again, with anybody. Which would all be Shiro’s fault for pushing Keith too hard, not paying enough attention to Keith’s needs and his limits, and generally disregarding the guy he loves in favor of putting on a better show. Putting the viewers’ desires ahead of Keith and his well-being… Simply thinking about that possibility makes Shiro feel like _the worst_.

For another thing, though, more time spent moaning means less time spent _eating_.

But Keith deserves some kind of reward. Probably needs some kind of help, besides. As he digs into his current slice, Shiro slips off the table and kneels between Keith’s legs. He stares at Keith’s cock—red and glistening, practically drenched and no doubt ready to come apart, but still hard, still hanging on beyond all semblance of good sense—because it’s easier to keep his jaw set when he isn’t looking at Keith’s face. Even so gently, Shiro licks a salty patch of pre-come off Keith’s cockhead. Although Keith’s hips buck and his throat lets slip a low, guttural sound, his cock skirts past Shiro’s nose, narrowly misses hitting Shiro in the face.

Somehow, Shiro catches the skin. Keith’s thrust at thin air drags Shiro’s tongue down his shaft, which only makes Keith’s groaning worse. Waggling his eyebrows and smirking at Keith’s belly—increasingly red, increasingly round, increasingly taut from how much Keith has crammed into himself in such a short period of time—Shiro snakes his tongue out around Keith’s girth. Licks up the heady mix of salt, and skin, and sticky, viscous pre-come as if nothing else could make him happier. Swallowing it, Shiro lets a genuine smile curl up his lips. He presses another kiss to the vein on the underside of Keith’s shaft.

“Fuuuuuck, Sable…” Keith grunts. His free hand darts into Shiro’s hair. Keith’s fingers knot themselves up in Shiro’s white fringe and he tugs. Probably unintentional, but it makes Shiro groan, all the same, and Keith’s head hits the the cushions with a dull thump! “Sable, please… Might not make it…”

“You can do it, Baby.” Shiro splays a hand out over Keith’s thigh. Guides him back down to the sofa. Tries not to lose himself in how easily he could lose his hand in Keith’s thighs. “Deep breaths. Focus. You’re doing so well for me. I know that you can make it—”

“_Not like that!_” Squirming, grousing, Keith wiggles his hips. The movement makes his face scrunch up. Makes him grit his teeth. An agonized whine drags itself up out of him—but he shakes his belly and gets Shiro blinking at it. “_Please_, Sable?”

Keith’s stomach doesn’t give way as nicely as his plush, soft thighs. Shiro’s fingers still sink into _some_ chub, sure. But the pizza’s already done a number on Keith. He could fit so much more food into himself—he _has_ before and he likely will again—but as Shiro splays a hands over Keith’s flesh, he finds it harder to the touch than he expected. That bulge right near the middle, all round and full… Shiro gasps as he digs his fingertips into the well-stuffed mound. This time, he winces from that sudden shock of air—_God, _**_why _**_is Hanahaki so annoying?_—but kneading at the hard spots and the tightly-packed knots makes Keith _moan so pretty_, which makes any pain worthwhile.

A quick glance up at Keith’s face—at the spasms of pleasure wracking his cheeks and the grit as he forces himself to keep going at his slice of pizza—and Shiro’s entire body feels so light, it’s a miracle he doesn’t dissipate into the atmosphere. As Keith folds up the last bit of crust and shoves the whole thing into his mouth, Shiro’s head spins as though he’s two seconds off from fainting. But Jesus, if he had to pick a cause of death other than, _“suffocated by Keith Kogane’s plush, pudgy, perfect thighs”_…

Keith flicks at Shiro’s forehead as soon as slice eleven’s gone. Determined as ever, he starts onto slice number twelve as soon as Shiro hands it over. God, he’s beautiful. So, _so_ beautiful. His full cheeks have flushed bright red. A lighter shade than his cock, certainly, but Keith still huffs and puffs his way through the pizza as if he’s fresh off of running a five-minute mile. Beads of sweat gleam on his forehead, and when he looks down, catching Shiro’s gaze, Keith eyes glimmer as if he’s genuinely pushing himself with this.

Fumbling for the remote control, Shiro switches the vibe back on. Keeps his other hand stretched out around Keith’s middle, pressing hard into the fullest part. Snorts when a moan of pleasure gets cut off by Keith belching halfway through. Slouching further into the couch—body wracked and muscles visibly tense with what is, according to Keith’s periodic gasps, a potent mix of _need _and _want_—Keith can’t stop himself from blushing. A smirk twists up Shiro’s lips as he pushes into another spot where Keith’s belly seems particularly distended. The expression explodes into a grin as Keith lets out another belch.

Hot and sick, lust shudders down Shiro’s spine. Heat jolts through him, corkscrews through his gut and the pit of his chest. Like it’s radiating off the skin of Keith’s belly, searing its way into Shiro’s body, and digging itself as deep as possible. Making Shiro twist. Making him grit his teeth and bite his lip and strain to keep his own cock under control because this clip is not about him. Punishing him for digging himself into this situation—or possibly for missing the way that Keith’s resting his current slice on the shelf of his belly instead of eating it. Getting grease all over his shirt and wasting valuable eating time.

Clicking his tongue, Shiro switches off the vibe and Keith slumps back harder than ever, lets out a sigh of relief. His cock’s still hard—_Christ, he must be _**_dying_**_. Oh my God, Keith, how do we make this go faster for you…_—and after just a moment, Keith tears into the slice again.

“God, but you’re amazing, Baby,” tumbles out of Shiro’s mouth before he knows that the words are building in his throat. “Look at you go…”

Shiro’s tongue darts across his lips. “Look at how far you’ve come, and you’re barely even trying…”

He inhales sharply as Keith shoves the rest of this slice into his mouth and rips off a huge chunk of pizza. Shiro’s breath hitches in his throat, watching helplessly as Keith’s cheeks puff up like a chipmunk, straining around how much food he expects himself to eat.

Groaning, Keith squirms and shakes his head. The sweat rolls down his face and oh _God_, Shiro wants to kiss it off of him. Not right now, obviously. Because this version of Sable likely wouldn’t. So, Shiro squeezes Keith’s knee and hopes that it gives him a shot in the arm. Enough affection and love to keep on going. To keep pushing himself further and further, harder and harder, beyond any of their wildest dreams.

Swallowing thickly, Shiro makes himself keep looking at Keith’s face. He can’t set his jaw. Can’t keep his gaze cold. Can’t do anything that Sable would probably do, in his position—but Hell, Keith’s skin is so smooth beneath his hands, and Keith needs to know that Shiro’s only full of love as he says, “I don’t know how you could ever lose _any _weight, if you eat like this all the time, Baby. Jesus, I… You’re outdoing _everything_ that I expected…”

Not entirely true, after all the other times he’s gotten to watch Keith eat. But it lights Keith’s face up with a smirk like he’s feeling exceptionally pleased with himself. His next bite is small, a fraction of the remaining slice. He winks at Shiro, though, and lets himself give up a breathy, gasping moan.

Shiro’s cheeks flush warm, probably twinging pinker than the inside of a strawberry. He has to clamp down on Keith’s knee to keep from covering his mouth. He swallows thickly and spluttering, he can’t find any of the words that he might give Keith if he actually had his wits about him—but how could anyone expect him to help himself, right now?

How could _anyone_ watch Keith wriggling like he wants to burrow back into the sofa—watch him sucking the crust of his pizza into his mouth centimeter by agonizing centimeter—and _not_ feel like their heart could give out at any second? Like their brain’s gone on vacation and, in its place, they’ve only got a vacant space, and heat, and the unfathomable sensation of _pink_.

Another tap on the head and he hands Keith his thirteenth slice. Only one remains in the box, standing alone and ready for Keith whenever he’s ready for it. Sniffing at the new piece he needs to work on, he writhes against the cushions. That moving makes Keith wince. Makes him whine. Makes the insides of his thighs jiggle like a jello-mold, going and going and going as if they don’t know how to stop (which is fine, unless Keith minds it, because Shiro would never want his boyfriend’s delicious rolls of chub to stop moving like they are).

At the hypnotic sight of that soft, pale flesh wobbling, Shiro has to choke down his own whine. Because Sable wouldn’t whine. Wouldn’t let Akira do that to him, no matter how much he can appreciate Akira’s body and the effort that he’s putting in. He _would_ turn the vibe back on, though—so, as Keith tears off his second bite of this slice, Shiro takes a deep breath and flicks the switch.

Keith’s entire body tenses like he’s getting shocked. His head thumps into the cushions again. Thwacks into them so hard that Shiro gasps again. He turns the vibe back off and Keith flops out.

“You’re doing so well, Baby,” he promises, in case Keith needs to hear it. “Eating so well. Like such a good little piggy. Such a _good_, eager fat-boy… I could watch you go to town like you’ve done all day…”

He isn’t lying. Isn’t getting lost in character as Sable, either.

But it’s more important that Shiro’s telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If Keith ever felt like letting him have that privilege, then Shiro would gladly watch him eat from sunup to sundown, or for twenty-four straight hours, or for however long Keith wanted. They would only break when Keith felt like pausing, or when Shiro needed to hit the kitchen to make him something else. Looking up at Keith right now, Shiro can imagine.

Watching Keith can’t be the only thing that Shiro brings to the table, though. Shooting clips together requires contributions from _both_ participants.

Inhaling deeply, he rubs his hand up and down Keith’s leg. Digs his fingers into the pudge that Keith’s put on while gaining weight. Butts the heel of his palm into the extra-jiggly soft spot on the inside of Keith’s thigh. Although he keeps himself from whining, he can’t hold back on a hot, heavy, longing sigh as Keith’s chub yields to his touch.

Hoping that he hasn’t winced too noticeably, Shiro turns his eyes back up to Keith’s face, all red and sweaty, with his mouth hanging wide open. God, Shiro could so easily shove more food in there, if he’d only—

But, no. Not right now. Not _yet_.

Soon, maybe, but first, there are other tasks ahead of them. Keith’s got two slices of his pizza left for him—_Just two more to go, Baby… More like one-and-a-half… This one and the one still in the box… You can do this in your sleep_—and all of the rewards that Shiro has laid out for them could too easily turn into a punishment. Could too easily get Keith going in ways that he’s not prepared to handle, in ways that he’s too keyed up for, in ways that he could not withstand. Not unless he wants to break the rules that Akira and Sable agreed upon in-character. 

As Keith chokes down another bite of slice thirteen, Shiro rests one hand back on his belly. As Keith moans from having his chub pinched and jostled, Shiro spread-eagles his other hand out on Keith’s thigh. Grips on tight because he needs to stay balanced as he leans up and in, as he kisses the soft flesh of Keith’s thighs. As much as he wants to keep watching Keith eat, Shiro closes his eyes and sucks Keith’s chub into his mouth. Tongues at Keith’s skin. Takes care to bite Keith gently, because his pudge is perfect and must be taken care of. But Shiro works this spot over with the intent to leave a hickey.

He’s mid-suck when Keith taps him on the head and asks for the last slice. Even though they have work to finish doing and Keith has waited more than long enough for his release, Shiro doesn’t get the pizza for him until he’s finished with the bit of chub he has in his mouth. While he’s eating, Shiro gives more attention to Keith’s belly. Rubbing it down. Pressing into every taut place that he can find. Not going hard enough to make Keith belch this time, simply massaging his distended middle. Trying to ease some of the built-up pressure and help get Keith through this last leg of today’s trials.

Finally, Keith chokes down one last bite and his fists slam down into the sofa’s. White-knuckled, he’s practically breathless. Shiro only flicks the vibe on for a couple seconds. Keith’s moans all come out sounding strangled. Like he’s trying to hold them back but they’re clawing up the inside of his throat and need to burst free.

“You did so well for me, Baby,” Shiro stage-whispers, lips right up by the skin of Keith’s shaft. “So, _so_ good.”

Even Shiro’s _breath_ makes Keith whimper for him. God, he must be superhuman for having lasted this long without a cock-ring.

Taking Keith into his mouth, Shiro doesn’t waste time on a build-up. Keith’s already so hot, his skin could melt Shiro’s lips. As Shiro drags back up his shaft, Keith shudders. _Hard_. His whole body quivers with _need_, even though the vibe’s turned off. His arms tremble as Shiro’s tongue curls around Keith’s shaft, as his lips work up and down Keith’s cock, as he sucks Keith off like he’s suffocating and there’s oxygen in Keith’s balls.

Only a few good sucks—barely enough effort for Shiro to get going on a blow-job, most days—and Keith gasps. Groans. Lets slip a high, tight noise as he spills into Shiro’s mouth, then collapses into the cushions, still gaping, and sweaty, and flushed bright red. Utterly boneless, Keith could ooze off the sofa at any second. For his own part, Shiro could get drunk from swallowing Keith’s come.

Keith doesn’t resist or protest as Shiro guides him into lying down. Bulging and unconstrained by his shirt, his belly sticks up into the air. When Shiro moves to stand, Keith whines and grabs at his sleeve. But he lets go when Shiro promises to be right back.

Which is a promise that he keeps—and he can’t fight off a smirk when he finds that Keith has closed his eyes. Can’t fight off the potentially questionable idea that sparks up in the back of his mind. Wiping his Baby’s face down with a cool, wet rag, Shiro tells Keith over and over how well he did. As if in prayer, he promises that Keith is so good, that Keith did such a _good job_ for him, that he’s amazing—and God, he _really_ is. The self-satisfied, beatific smile that Keith gives him makes Shiro’s entire body flush with warmth. Makes Shiro’s lungs flutter as if they’re trying to burst clean out of his chest.

Before his heart or his Hanahaki can get any ideas about ruining this—before _Shiro_ can let himself back out—he clambers up onto the sofa, straddling Keith’s hips. At first, he only rubs Keith’s belly. Works his hands over that swollen, warm, distended bulge where Keith’s crammed all the pizza that he’s eaten. When Keith belches, the sounds come out softly, as if Keith doesn’t want to insist upon himself too much. Beaming like sunshine, Keith radiates bliss. Happiness. Peace. None of the understandable frustration that he had with Shiro before they started.

Then, Shiro reaches for the coffee-table and Keith furrows his brow. His eyes go wide as Shiro pulls the tab to open a package of Oreos.

“What d’you say, Baby?” Smirking, Shiro holds up a cookie. “Think you can get all of these down, too?”

“God, yeah… I’m just getting started, Sable… Let’s keep going.”

“Mmm, you sure?” Shiro arches an eyebrow. Edges his knee into Keith’s belly. “How much more can you get down?”

Inhaling sharply, Keith grins. He gets a telltale glimmer in his eye. “As much as you want, Sable. As much as it takes.”


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since he’s actually appearing for a scene now, albeit over a Skype call, I just feel compelled to mention that Adam was originally an OC named Cameron. But I’ve been writing this for long enough that Shiro was revealed as canon MLM during the writing process and I made the executive decision to just retcon his high school ex-boyfriend into Adam because it was easier.
> 
> Anyway, Adam tries too hard to fix things, even when they aren’t necessarily broken. He actively wants to be a Manic Pixie Dream-Boy. This isn’t particularly relevant right this second, and really won’t be in this specific fic, but whenever I finish this one, there are two sequels that I want to do. In one, Lotor and Hunk get to take center-stage and Lotor gets to tell Honerva off like she richly deserves. In the other, Shiro introduces Adam to Sendak and shenanigans ensue.
> 
> But that sounds like a problem for future-me.

Sunday morning, Keith gets up first for once and refuses to tell Shiro where he’s going. Zethrid’s going to be there, wherever it is, and Keith insists that he doesn’t want to get his hopes up about the idea that he had on Friday night. Apparently, though, it’s more important for him to kiss Shiro on the forehead and remind him that, as per their agreement, he gets to take his morning run or his daily strength and resistance training, but if he goes for both of them, they won’t even remotely be having sex when Keith gets back.

Which works out well enough, Shiro guesses. On one hand, getting some extra rest probably can’t hurt, not least since Dr. Carter said that not getting enough sleep had probably helped to make Shiro get as far as he did, before. Granted, it’s not really _sleeping_ so much as dozing, and rolling around the mattress, and wishing that he had Keith wrapped up in the sheets with him.

On the other hand, though, having the apartment to himself for once means that Shiro has some extra space to relax. He feels weird not going for a run before making himself some egg whites, but he also gets a chance to comb through a few things on his computer. Email, Facebook, _The Washington Post_, shooting Aunt Satomi a message about how she and Naoko can’t come visit until April after all, reading over and replying to an email from Maurice about Lotor’s autographs and how things are going for him and his nephew in PyeongChang—and most importantly, he logs into Skype, looking for Laura’s username to pop up. She said that she’d be free to chat today, and Shiro owes her more than a few explanations. For the lack of selfies on his Facebook, the way that his Instagram looks like it’s gotten hacked by an unreasonably attractive underwear model, how he didn’t tell her about any of this, the same everyone else…

Shiro’s poking through a Cracked.com list (_“Seven True-Life Hanahaki Horror Stories That We’re Grateful Happened To Other People”_) when Skype pops up in the center of his screen, letting him know that Laura’s calling him instead. Thank God his webcam takes a moment to connect because Shiro needs that extra couple seconds. Deep breaths to steady his nerves. Mental reminders that he’s talking to Laura, one of the only friends he had from first grade all through high school. She’d never hurt him, not intentionally.

By the time Laura’s grinning at him with her full, round, freckled cheeks, and her button nose, and her black plastic glasses with the rectangular frames, Shiro’s plastered on a smile for her. Yes, it’s fake, but they’re catching up after too long; there’s no need to be depressing. He gives her a little wave with his greeting, and struggles to keep his grin up when Laura shakes her head and coughs up a breathy, disbelieving laugh.

“_God_,” she breathes, trying not to gape. “So, you aren’t dating an underwear model after all.”

“Keith isn’t either, technically? But only because I’m not, y’know… I haven’t actually gone and posed for any…” Shiro trails off, furrowing his brow and blinking at the way Laura’s beaming. “…Sweetheart? You okay?”

“You and Keith, huh? _Finally_?”

“Wait, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Come on, you had to know how into you he was—”

“Did literally everyone know about this but me?”

“In fairness, Sweetheart? I don’t think he’s always known, himself. Or if he has, he hasn’t known _how_ he’s in love with you?”

“So, basically, Keith and I deserve each other because… we’re a pair of idiots? Who’ve been in love for longer than we realize? And everyone else figured out how we feel about each other before we did? Or at the same time we did, even if we didn’t act on it for… _whatever_ reasons?”

Confirmation wasn’t what Shiro expected. Even after how many people have come out of the woodwork recently to tell him that Keith’s been in love with him since time immemorial and/or lecture him about his own feelings when he literally did not ask, he thought that for sure, someone who knows them would be as surprised as Shiro was over the part where Keith does actually want him for a boyfriend. Surely, their “finally” getting together must come as a shock to someone who doesn’t even need to deal with them in person that often.

Instead of letting him off the hook, Laura nods and sagging with his whole body, Shiro groans.

“Well, whatever the whole story is on anybody’s side?” Looking back up at her, he can’t help the smile that creeps onto his lips. “Yeah, me and Keith are together, now. We haven’t made it _Facebook_ official yet or anything—”

“But oh my _God_, you’ve been keeping pretty much everything off of Facebook. Or that’s what it _looks_ like, anyway.”

“Am I _wrong_, though? Given all the public foofaraw about privacy settings and data mining and selling our information to hostile foreign powers?”

“I wouldn’t say you’re _wrong_, Honey. Just that, y’know…” Laura shrugs and twitches her nose like a bunny. “I can tell when you’re retroactively trying to justify things? Because there’s no way that you knew about any of that beforehand, right?”

“Yeah, I would’ve _done something_ about it, if I’d known in advance.” Huffing, Shiro tucks his white fringe back behind his ear. “I mostly just kept my newer selfies off of Facebook because I was being kind of an idiot while Lotor and I were out in California. Not about _how_ I did all this, because Lotor would’ve killed me, but…”

“You mean in the way that you didn’t tell any of the people who love you about it?”

Shiro nods. “I honestly didn’t think it’d be that big of a deal? I mean, Ryou and Keith have been trying to talk me out of dieting since the first one that I got on. And our other friends were never exactly enthused about the idea of me trying to lose weight, like I wanted—”

“I don’t blame them—”

“Neither do I. Not in retrospect. Not exactly—”

“It sounds like you kinda want to build to blaming them, though?” Slouching onto her elbows, Laura sighs in the way that Shiro wishes he could do right now. “And Honey, _please_ correct me if I’m wrong about that. Because I really want to be wrong about it, and I _don’t_ want for things to get weird because I started talking over you about your feelings—”

“I don’t feel like you’re doing that, Lulu. Promise. You’re not using the exact words I’d use, but—”

“But whatever words anybody uses for what’s going on here? It _does_ kinda sound like you want to blame everybody else for what you did? And for _why_ you didn’t tell anybody?” Pouting, she rests a cheek in her palm. “But it also sounds like you really need to talk about it?”

Taking a deeper breath than usual briefly makes Shiro wince. Great, pain on the inhale… He hasn’t coughed up any petals yet today, and if he’s getting pain without those? That’s probably a bad thing. On the plus, the deep breath _does_ clear Shiro’s head a little. Kneading at his temple gives him something to keep grounded. Rubbing at the top of his spine, Shiro has to fight himself about sighing. He’ll only feel worse about everything if he does that. He’ll cause himself more pain, and God, his nerves are fraying enough from the fact that Laura’s looking up at him so expectantly but he hasn’t found the words he wants for anything—

“I guess a lot of the problem is that I’ve _been_ talking? But every time I try to talk, it seems like I dig myself an even deeper hole. Except for the times when I don’t feel like anybody’s listening. Except for Keith and Lotor. And Ryou. And Ulaz, if only because listening to me is literally his _job_, as a therapist.” With a small smile, Shiro adds, “And then there’s you.”

“And I want to listen, Sweetie,” Laura promises with a smile. “As long as you wanna talk.”

With Laura’s permission to get going, the words bubble up in Shiro’s chest and come rushing out of his mouth like nothing can stop them. There’s something impossibly safe about the way that Laura smiles at him, and she’s given him the room to talk freely—which, apparently, he needs more of than he thought.

He starts at how much it sucks for everyone to think that he only wanted to lose weight for the sake of being conventionally hot (_“I mean, I wanted that, sure? But why doesn’t anybody ever ask about how bad my blood pressure was? Or the number that getting so big did on my back? Why doesn’t anybody care that I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs on my own without getting winded? Am I _**_crazy_**_ for hating those things? Or feeling insecure? I wanted to change those things about myself, so I took charge of my own life and did it”_).

Then comes the frustration with how many people think that his primary interest was in having sex (_“And seriously, Lulu? Until Keith, I hadn’t gotten hit on at all since I got back down to about two-seventy-five. Like, ‘No fats, no fems, no Asians’—come on, considering how much _**_that’s_**_ a thing, I thought that I’d end up getting laid way more often once I had, y’know, uh? Lotor calls it, ‘Cast iron pecs, thighs that could choke a bear, and a butt you could eat breakfast off of’? Because he starts quoting Blanche Devereaux off ‘The Golden Girls’ when he’s bored? But point is, until Keith and I got everything together, I was way better off being the guy who people wanted to sleep with but no one wanted to admit to dating.”_)

Then, Shiro heads onward, bouncing between a couple ideas before he finally finds the mental thread connecting them (_“It’s like everybody won’t respect me enough just tell me outright that they didn’t want me to lose the weight? Like, they think my entire reason for feeling bad about my body before came down to the fact that the rest of the world didn’t tend to like it—so, once again, I’m the shallow jerk who only cares about popularity and what other people think of me, and they all think that my only problem is how much other people hated me being fat? But they don’t get how they’re doing the exact same thing by trying to dictate how I should relate to my body. Trying to tell me what’s best for _**_my_**_ body, and how to be the happiest in _**_my_**_ body”_).

Which is when Laura finally holds up a hand by way of asking Shiro to hush for a moment. “Sweetie, did anybody ever outright say any of that? Or did they say something else that you might be misconstruing? Or… Where are you getting all of this from, basically?”

Shiro winces his way through a deep breath and rubs at the bridge of his nose for a moment. “I mean, maybe no one’s been quite so on-the-nose about things with me? But at the same time, all of the body positive garbage that they’ve tried to sell me on for _years_? It’s been about how you have to love yourself, and accept yourself and your flaws, and accept your body instead of letting the haters get you down? And I mean—”

“Considering how much experience you and I both have with those so-called _haters_?” Laura quirks her fingers into quotation marks. “I can’t exactly blame anybody for thinking that you had a problem with your body because of other people being small-minded jerks about your weight.”

“Yeah, no. Me neither. Don’t get me wrong? I wish that I _could_ blame them, or hold any of this against them, but…”

Swallowing the sigh that desperately wants to claw its way out of him, Shiro nudges his laptop backward and slouches onto the kitchen table. He probably looks pathetic—and his white fringe comes loose and droops over that half of his face, which no doubt makes him look even worse—but as he takes in Laura’s smile and the earnest glimmer behind her eyes, Shiro isn’t sure he minds how pathetic he looks. He doesn’t mind the fact that his own smile is no doubt as convincing hearing someone claim that they aren’t stealing anybody’s cookies while their hand is literally in the jar. He doesn’t mind the fact that Keith still isn’t back, which probably means that Keith’s having a good time, but God, Shiro would really like to kiss his boyfriend.

If he truly minds _anything_ about this moment? Is the fact that Laura’s up in Maine instead of being right here where Shiro could easily scoop her up into a hug. Skype calls like this work out alright in a pinch—and now that he’s on this call with Laura, Shiro regrets how long it’s been since he’s let his old friend get a glimpse of his face—but at the moment, Shiro would do a lot of things in the name of getting some gentle, affectionate physical contact.

“My point is,” he says, combing his fingers through his white fringe. “I get where they’re all coming from. I’m worried about some of the same things that they are. I have been since Dr. Hall—she was my therapist out in Los Angeles—asked why Ulaz _hadn’t_ diagnosed me with an eating disorder. Then, before she’d listen to me about his rationale, she needed to get my permission to discuss my case with Dr. Carter, my primary care doc out there, and with Ulaz, and then with the nutritionist that the professionals and Lotor all insisted I work with—”

“Good thing. That they insisted on that too, I mean.” Laura gives him a small smile. “I know how you used to eat when you were quote-unquote _‘dieting,’ _Sunshine. And I’m glad you had a chance to learn better from someone who knows what they’re talking about.”

“So am I, but at the same time, it’s like?” Making a vague, throaty, _“I don’t know”_ kinda sound, Shiro shrugs and hopes that Laura gets something in the vague vicinity of whatever his point thinks it is right now. “Some of the habits I learned out there? They’re sustainable, but I’m _worried_ about them. And I can’t ask hardly anybody out here for help with them because then, they’ll decide that they’re right about me, and my weight, and how I feel about my weight, and everything.”

He twines his fingers through his white fringe again and tugs—probably harder than necessary. “If I admit to most of my people down here that I’m feeling nervous about letting myself eat some of Hunk’s brownies, even the low-carb ones that he made with strawberries and specifically wanted me to try? Then they’ll rub it in my face that they were right, and I was wrong, and I never should’ve lost weight in the first place because now, I’m a nervous wreck about how many sweets I eat. Never mind that I’m asking for _help_, or like…”

Shaking his head, he goes on, “As soon as they hear that, they’ll be like, ‘God, Shiro, don’t you know that this is completely stupid? Don’t you know that being scared of eating brownies and getting fat all over again is even_ more _unhealthy than feeling like you can’t breathe after going up half a flight of stairs? Is being skinny really worth it?’”

Shivering so hard that it hurts—unable to fight the way that his chest shakes and his teeth chatter—he slouches further. Does Shiro know better? Yes. He cringes, and he can’t tell if it’s from. Sitting up straight like an adult feels like it’s asking way too much from him right now.

“Never mind how I’m not _saying_ that the way I feel isn’t unhealthy,” he says. “Hypothetically, I’d be saying the exact opposite because, to me, it’s very obviously unhealthy. It goes against the whole idea of balance, which is what I wanted to get more of in my life…”

Laura sighs in the way that Shiro wants to once again, and it almost eases some of the pressure building up inside his own chest.

Wait, not pressure.

Another cold shudder jolts through his chest. Something scratches at the back of his throat—_hard_. Unrelenting. Unsatisfied, like it won’t be happy until he drops dead. Laura starts to say something and, eyes trying to bug out of his head, Shiro holds up a hand. He promises he’ll be quick about this, only a second. He fumbles, grabs the Stop-N-Shop bag he’s using, sucks in a breath so deep, it feels like he’s got a werewolf hiding in his chest and trying to claw its way out.

Then, the Hanahaki comes for him. Each cough wracks his chest with deep tremors. Thank God for them, though. The pain keeps Shiro from disappearing into his own head, but also makes the process of coughing petals easier. Anytime it subsides, he’s left with the smooth, slimy, and nerve-rattlingly _weird_ sensation of petals slipping around the inside of his mouth. Trying to catch on his tongue, and sometimes managing it. Which, in turn, shreds Shiro’s nerves like someone’s put them through a wood-chipper. Whether he starts crying from that or from the pain itself, he can’t tell. But the tears spill over onto his cheeks soon enough, all hot and viscous.

When the coughing finally dies down, Shiro’s nearly filled the grocery bag to its limit. For the sake of keeping a decent record, he writes down how many fully formed azaleas came up in this batch (eighteen, which probably explains why he feels like he could take a thousand-year nap). Laura swears that it only took Shiro three-and-a-half minutes to get them all up, which dizzies him so much, he has to fight the urge to collapse on the table with his forearms as a pillow.

It’s either that or a lack of oxygen, but since he’s finally breathing deeply without any pain? Probably the sheer unreality of this situation.

Forcing himself up so he can get some water and put on some of Antok’s Hanahaki tea, Shiro deadpans, “At least my first flare-up waited to set in until _after_ I busted my ass about getting healthy. I mean, if it’d come for me when I was bigger, I’d probably have passed out and died by now. Thank you, lowered average blood pressure and increased lung capacity.”

Laura hums noncommittally. “But as you were saying? About your other friends?”

“Yeah, so, they keep talking about my getting hot as if it’s all I cared about.” Settling back onto his elbows, Shiro quirks his shoulders. “As if there’s no other reason for me to want to lose any weight. As if the _only_ reason why I didn’t want to love my body as it was? The only thing it could _possibly_ have been, obviously, that I wasn’t good-looking by most normal people’s standards. Or that I was, ‘You’d be so beautiful if you lost two hundred pounds.’”

Shiro huffs, blowing at his white fringe and whining when it flops back over his eye. “Sure, I hated the way I looked, I wanted to be thinner, and I _did _care about my appearance. But they act like that invalidates parts of the situation like, ‘I engaged in behaviors that were terrible for me—my yo-yo over-dieting chief among them—and fact is, I would’ve slowly killed myself if I didn’t change _something_ about my life. And I know that I can be melodramatic. I know that I joke about death and dying more than people like from me. But I just don’t want to die.’”

“Skinny people almost always think like that. Even some of the ones who used to be fat. It all goes back to looks, and size, and whether or not somebody’s skinny.” Propping her chin up in her palm, Laura lets her face fall. She doesn’t _frown_, not exactly, but there’s still something off about her expression. Something tired, as if she’s had all the cheer drained out of her. “I mean, I can’t ever go to yoga or the gym with Amy without someone asking how much weight I want to lose. Or what my goal weight is. Or what I’m gonna do when I don’t have to buy plus-size jeans anymore, as if that’s gotta be my endgame.”

“Yeah, Heaven forbid you work out to try and manage your depression. Or your PCOS.”

“Apparently, me caring about my polycystic ovaries and the Hell they can wreak on my body? That’s even less likely than you working out because you _weren’t_ taking care of yourself before and wanted to stop that cycle already.”

“This guy at the gym we used out in LA? His idea of flirting was telling me how _inspiring_ I was—”

“What, because you were fat and at the gym?” Rolling her eyes, Laura groans. “Yeah, because fat people exist to inspire skinny folks.”

“Because a fat person taking care of themself by going to the gym? Is so inherently different from a skinny person doing it.”

“_Duh_. Obviously, Sunshine. We’re _overcoming_ our own laziness and history of making excuses. So we can get into their country club.”

“Honestly, it feels more like a cult, sometimes?”

“One of the body-acceptance bloggers I like has called it that before. ‘The cult of skinny.’”

“I mean, they emotionally overload you like you’re getting sucked into a cult.” When this makes Laura peer at him bemusedly, Shiro shrugs. “It’s something I read about for one of the shorts that Lotor and I made out at USC. When some cults are trying to recruit people, they do this thing called love-bombing. Picking out insecure, vulnerable folks and then giving them this total onslaught of positive affirmation. Then, they take it away at a moment’s notice, for any reason, to make you feel like you _need_ them. Like you can’t live without them because no one else in your life thinks that you’re worth literally anything.”

Laura grimaces, but it looks like she wants to be giving Shiro a sardonic grin. “Yeah, that sounds about right,” she mutters, almost quietly enough for Skype to miss it. “Sounds like the one guy at mine and Amy’s gym. First of all, he didn’t get that I called her my girlfriend in a _lesbian_ way until he saw us kiss each other. Then, even though he knows I’m taken and not into men like that? Whenever we’re there at the same time, he wants to tell me how great it is that I keep coming back, and how he _knows_ that I can drop the weight if I really want to and keep working.”

“Does he ever offer to go over your diet with you?” Shiro cringes when she nods. “The idiot at my California gym did that, too. He was all, ‘Let’s go to this healthy place I love in WeHo, it’s not that expensive, we’ll do lunch and I’ll give you some pointers’—”

“In other words, ‘You’re nice and I want to date you, but you’re not skinny enough yet, so I need an excuse to be seen with you.’”

“Pretty much. He didn’t even _try_ being subtle about it. Still, I thought I’d give him a shot, right?”

“Oh no, _Honey_. You _didn’t_.” Laura sighs in sympathetic exasperation. “You must’ve _really _missed Keith, to do that.”

“No! I mean, yeah, I did? But I also didn’t harbor any ideas about him waiting around for me. Not least because I didn’t know how he felt until Thursday night.” A deep breath in, and Shiro stops himself just short of sighing. “It’s more that I looked past all of the uncomfortable parts because I was excited for him to flirt with me. And I really hoped Shane was just awkward, and ignorant about what it’s like for fat gay guys, so he didn’t know what else to talk about, aside from that?”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Shiro shakes his head as if it might exorcise all memory of Shane from his mind for the next foreseeable ever. “Then, we actually go on the date and literally all he wants to talk about is my weight, and food, and how I even got up to four-thirty-five in the first place. I try to ask about his parents and sisters? He wants to talk about how his Mom makes amazing chicken tetrazzini and I’d absolutely love it, like enough to set my diet back a good ten pounds. I try to ask about his job? He wants to talk about how weird it’s gotta be for me as the only fat guy at the studio. I try to turn the conversation onto _sex_? He wants to talk about how one of his exes got up to like, six-hundred pounds and getting topped by him was a totally mind-blowing experience. But can you guess what the worst part was?”

“Mmm, the fact that punching him in the mouth would’ve injured your hand and gotten you arrested for assault?”

“Nah, Lulu, that’s like, the third or fourth worst thing. And the fifth worst thing was that I had to be Lotor’s impulse control when I told him how the date went.” Wilting enough that he has to adjust his posture so it won’t hurt, Shiro huffs. “Seriously, though? The number one worst part about that date with Shane was that he tried to tell me that he _wasn’t_ a feeder and he _didn’t_ have a fat fetish. Like, he got visibly disappointed when I insisted that I’d already lost seventy pounds from fixing my habits and getting healthier. He pouted when I told him that I put on so much weight in the first place by trying so hard to starve myself, not by eating everything in a ten-mile radius.”

This time, the sigh bursts out of Shiro without giving him the option to hold back. He groans through the pain, but God, the release was worth it. Maybe he doesn’t feel that much better overall, not least because his lungs remain full of red azaleas, but he feels like he’s let go of something that’s been dragging him down. Like he’s shucked off the anvil he’d unknowingly worn around his neck for who even knows how long.

“No offense, Sunshine,” Laura prods when she’s given Shiro more than ample time to calm himself down and get his lungs back in order (as close as they can be during a Hanahaki flare-up). “But that guy sounds like such a jerk, I wouldn’t blame any skinny people for being dead shocked that you even considered dating him.”

“Yeah, why do you think I haven’t told anyone about him, yet? Like I really _need_ to hear a lecture about how much better I deserve, and how I’m such a great guy, and why can’t I just love myself but only ever in these specific, socially prescribed fashions that have been decided upon by some vague omniscient counsel of your best, almost unilaterally skinny friends.” Shiro ruffles the white fringe without tugging on it. “Like, Keith would understand, but it feels _weird_, talking about other guys I’ve slept with, considering how I feel about Keith—”

“Can’t say that I blame you for that, really. It feels like a bit of an insult, doesn’t it—”

“Exactly. It’s like… He _knows_ that I’ve been with other guys. He knows that Maurice and I split up amicably, while Lotor and I stayed friends, obviously. But going on too much about one guy who I took to dinner once and didn’t even sleep with?” Rubbing at one of his eyes, Shiro huffs. “It’s like I’m rubbing his face in the fact that I went out with someone else, who happened to be a jerk. And since Shane hasn’t come up naturally?”

“Well, I’m glad I could help you by listening, Sweetie. Letting you get it off your chest.”

“I didn’t even know how much I needed to talk about that, though. I’ve tried not to think about him for _months_.”

“You haven’t felt like you had anybody who would listen if you opened up about him, though—”

“Not like… I mean, yes, that’s true? But at the same time, I’ve wanted to put him out of my mind—”

“With you, though? Unless you really _have_ gotten body-snatched by aliens or something out of the trashiest?” Laura hums as though she’s actually thinking about this, when she sure sounds like a woman who already knows exactly what she thinks and what she wants to say. “Repressing things and trying to shove them out of your mind so intently? Usually one of the biggest signs that you need to talk about something.”

Shiro doesn’t bother trying to dispute this. He simply shrugs and tells her, “I’m not saying that I don’t need to talk about how things went with him. But I tried to make myself stop thinking about Shane for so long, and it didn’t really… I thought I might be able to tell The Gang when I got back home? I thought Lance and Hunk, for sure—”

“Wait, did something happen with Lance and Hunk? Other than what you’ve said? Which hasn’t been much, by the way?”

Considering that he’s told her through their texts about how losing weight apparently means that Lance and Hunk hate him now, Shiro doesn’t know why they need to go over this. But at the same time, it’s only fair to answer Laura’s question in more detail. Not that Shiro enjoys it very much. Telling her about how Lance has decided that he’s no longer the same Shiro who Lance knew and loved—that threatens to make Shiro get frustrated all over again, vaguely makes him want to storm upstairs and give Lance several pieces of his mind.

Telling her that Hunk’s been a downright human cold shoulder ever since Shiro got back and that giving him space has done absolutely nothing to help matters any—that makes Shiro’s chest ache with emotional pain, instead of physical. His _heart_ writhes and squirms and threatens to set him on fire, rather than his lungs. It’s not an improvement in the slightest.

At least, once he’s done feeling his feelings and sharing them all over Laura, she tucks a thick lock of hair behind her ear and gives him a small, reassuring smile. It doesn’t make his heart stop feel like he’s getting stabbed. But on the other hand, she _does_ make Shiro’s chest flush warm—a nice break from all the chills to which this godforsaken Hanahaki has subjected him, lately—and she gives him the feeling that it’s safe here. That it’s perfectly okay if he needs to just be _not okay_. That she doesn’t mind if he isn’t at his one-hundred percent best because sometimes, even someone who’s supposed to be so perfect? Needs ample room to be an actual human person, every so often.

God, what Shiro wouldn’t give for more of The Gang to listen to Laura, Keith, Ryou, and Lotor about how to handle him. In the meantime, he sits up a little straighter, bolstered by the fact that Laura wants to give him room to be a mess—to say nothing of the way that she has so much visible, palpable hope for the situation to get better.

“Maybe it’s not so much that they need time, or space, or room to get used to the way that you look now, Sunshine? Maybe it’s more that they pair of them…” Laura shrugs. Tries to keep up her smile. “Maybe they don’t actually _feel_ like they know what’s going on? And they don’t feel like they can get used to things without that knowledge?”

“That’s what I’m confused about, though? The idea that they don’t know what’s going on—”

“Well, how do you mean? When you said that everything’s straightforward and that they should get it easily?”

“I mean that I didn’t like the way things were going with my body, so I did something about it.”

Under the scrutiny of Laura’s pointedly arched brow, Shiro tries to center himself. Tries to steady himself. Tries to get himself ready for an explanation that he’s making up completely on the spot because he owes Laura _something_ but he has no idea what else to_ do_, right now. He’s been over so many versions of this explanation for different people—for Keith, for Ryou, for Lotor, for Ulaz, for Aunt Satomi and Aunt Naoko, for Uncle Mitch, the last time that he called—but once again, the words that Shiro wants feel like someone’s super-glued them to the back of his throat. He has to say them, though. No matter how difficult it proves, Shiro _needs_—

“Okay, so, I was fat,” he blurts out before he can summon the impulse control to keep himself quiet. “Six-foot-four, four-hundred-and-thirty-five pounds, most of it the exact opposite of muscle. I had that big belly, and huge thighs, and even my biggest clothes were feeling tight again when I started. There aren’t any two ways about what I was, right? Because I was just _fat_.”

So far, so not completely awful. At least Shiro hasn’t started throwing out any insults that would make Ryou throw something at his head. At least Laura’s nodding along without telling him to shut up and be kinder to himself. At least he doesn’t feel like he has anxiety gremlins down in his chest with the azaleas, clamping themselves around his lungs because how dare Shiro want to breathe.

“Here’s the rub, though: I didn’t like being fat and I wasn’t exactly quiet about this.” For want of _something_ to do with his restless hands, Shiro drags them through his bangs. Slumping forward, he rests his forehead on his palms and his weight on his elbows. “And yes, fine, I didn’t like the way I looked. But more than that, I didn’t like how it felt to be that big. I didn’t like how it felt like my size meant my body wasn’t _mine_. Not being able to use the stairs without everything hurting. Huffing and puffing through walking more than a couple blocks, or carrying the laundry upstairs—y’know, things that _should not_ be so difficult for a guy my age. Never mind the way that people stared. Or the jokes. Or the people reaching in my cart at Stop-N-Shop to tell me that I don’t really _need_ the cake that I was _trying _to get for Keith’s birthday—”

“Presumptuous assholes,” Laura mutters, rolling her eyes.

“Pretty much. Still doesn’t beat people taking _fruit_ out of your cart, though.”

“‘Oranges have too much sugar, you don’t need that,’ my big, fat ass—”

“Exactly. And I was tired of dealing with that. I wanted it to stop, but more than that? More than anything else? I wanted to feel like I _belonged _in my body. Like it was _mine_.” Shiro sighs before he can think to stop himself. Once the pain subsides, he shakes his head. “So, I did what I could about the things I didn’t like, and I took control. I admitted that I wasn’t actually taking good care of myself and learned better ways of doing it. I admitted that I had a messed up relationship with food and learned more about why I did and what to do about it. And because I put in all of that work? I lost some weight, like I wanted.”

“Not for nothing, Sunshine? But it looks like a bit more than _some_.”

“Okay, I’m understating. But does that matter? I still don’t feel like my body’s really mine—”

“Because of Lance and the others picking at you? Saying that you aren’t the guy they’ve always known?”

“A little bit. But it’s not all on them. Not really.”

Frowning sympathetically, Laura slouches closer to her webcam. “D’you want to talk about that?”

“Yeah, but no?” Shiro grumbles into his palm, at himself more than anything or anyone else. So far, it’s a pretty bad answer, but he tries to spit out a better one: “If I felt like I understood it, then I’d want to talk about it more? Except I don’t feel like I get what I’m feeling. Not even a little bit. Stuff with Lance and Hunk isn’t helping, but there’s still a weird sense of… I don’t even know?”

The lack of self-comprehension gets to him so badly, Shiro feels like his head’s submerged in water. His pulse pounds in his ears, not racing but going hard enough that the rest of the world fades out. He can make out Laura’s voice, but not the words. None of what she’s saying makes sense or connects to things that Shiro understands. But at least shaking his head rouses _something _in his skull and makes him feel like he can talk again:

“From Lance and Hunk’s side? As far as this whole mess goes with stuff that they can know, take into account, and respond to?” Shiro fights down a sigh, but a plaintive whine slips loose instead. At least it doesn’t _hurt_ that much. “I got healthy and it involves losing weight. What’s so difficult to understand about that?”

Humming, Laura pushes her glasses up and gets as close to making eye-contact as she can. “How much do they know about your side of this situation, though?” Confusion earns Shiro a _look_ like Laura can’t believe he isn’t following her logic. “Do they know how much you’ve been through that made you want to lose weight in the first place? Or that it was about more than being hot, to you?”

Shiro needs to think about that question, but ultimately decides, “No. I don’t think they do. I mean, they know I didn’t like being so big, but I haven’t really gone into why?” He takes a moment so he can fend off the impulse to sigh. “I touched on the bullying with Hunk, a bit? But even then…”

“You think you might make some progress by opening up to them, hmm? Especially after you kept the big diet secret?”

“Yeah… That’s probably a really good idea.”

Laura’s eyes gleam with relief as she pushes her glasses up. As much as they can while speaking over Skype, they make eye-contact and it feels almost the same as being in each other’s presence. Sure, Laura still isn’t here for Shiro to hug for real, but there’s the same rush of warmth that he’s always associated with their friendship. It’s so sweet to feel that for the first time in so painfully long—and then she reaches over to adjust her webcam and knocks it off its post.

Shiro snorts while she cusses her way through fixing it, blinking bemusedly at the view of her bedroom, and then at the look of consternation twisting up her lips. “And here, we were doing so well on acting like actual adults.”

“I’ve never acted like an actual adult in my entire life and neither have you.”

“Well, I live in perpetual hope that someday, we might figure ourselves out on that count.”

“It’s cute that you believe in possibility. But you really shouldn’t hope like that, Sunshine. I mean, it borders on self-delusion.”

“Oh, is that so?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Laura does a halfway decent job of keeping her face neutral, almost sour—until she bursts out in a string of snickers. “We’re about as likely to figure ourselves out by anybody else’s standards as you are to come down with potentially lethal Hanahaki.”

“I was just reading an article about that this morning…” Shiro slouches back onto his elbows, giving up a throaty little noise. “I mean, it was clickbait on Cracked.com, not any of the legitimate information that Lotor’s put together. That includes the stuff he dug up as background research for our screenplay _and_ the stuff that he assembled because I finally got my first flare-up, and I’ve been coughing up a whole flower shop’s worth of red azaleas.”

“Keith’s flowers?” Laura snickers. “You are so far gone for that boy.”

“Yes, we’ve established that. Seriously, though, Lulu? Some of the stories on that list were _horrifying_. Like, there’s some girl in Melbourne who got her first flare-up when she was _five_. I mean, Keith wasn’t that much older when he had his first flare-up, and his first bout of Hanahaki was over his Mom too, but…” Shaking his head, Shiro tucks his white fringe behind his ear. “So far, he hasn’t done any permanent damage his lungs. Definitely not as bad as the girl in that story. She’s going to need medical assistance breathing for the rest of her life.”

”How does permanent lung damage even _happen_ with Hanahaki?”

“Honestly, how does it _not_ happen? Or at least, why isn’t it more common?”

“I’ve never heard of anybody getting it at all. Like, you grow the flowers, cough them up, and then it’s over.”

“Isn’t that _weird_, though? Our lungs spontaneously sprout flowers, which are somehow always symbolically representative of the people we’re coughing them up for—and that doesn’t sound _strange_?” Shiro kneads at the bridge of his nose as if it’s going to help him feel less like a total crazy person (which it doesn’t). “Humor me, okay? Pretend that you’ve never heard of Hanahaki before, okay? You’re an alien or whatever, and you’re making first contact with this species of backwards, allegedly advanced apes—”

“Okay, but am I Vulcan or Klingon? Or Bajoran? Cardassian? Twi’lek? Irken? Cylon? Ythrian? Vogon? Asari? Tralfamadorian? Xenomorph? Something else?” In the face of Shiro giving her the flattest, most unimpressed face that he can muster, Laura shrugs. “Come on, what species am I? That’s going to affect how I react to this.”

“Whatever, you’re a Vulcan, okay? You’re a Vulcan emissary, and you just found out that the species who just achieved lightspeed travel? They have flowers, which are normally separate from them.” Shiro takes a deep breath and hopes that it will steady his nerves enough to get through this. “Except for _sometimes_, when said flowers spring up in their lungs over feelings of love that they feel are unrequited. Any kind of love, not exclusively romantic.”

He rubs his forehead, and oddly enough, it _does_ make him feel more capable of breaking down his rationale. “There are no signs of infection that cause this to happen. No bacteria, no viruses, no parasites—but the flowers are definitely biologically distinct from your new human contacts, because their immune systems attack them and their bodies try to get rid of them. This happens with minimal lasting damage, if any, and none of the humans think that this is strange. They can’t tell you _why _this happens—they have no_ logical_ explanation that doesn’t ultimately boil down to, ‘That’s just the way it is’—but pretty much everyone just accepts this.”

Resting his cheek in his palm, Shiro swallows a sigh. “Now, apply all of your Vulcan logic and tell me: does that make sense?”

Although Laura opens her mouth like she has a retort in mind—knowing her, it’s probably something deadpan yet affectionate—she quickly drops it in favor of squealing. “Ooooh, we’re gonna add someone else onto the call—if that’s okay with you, I mean?”

Supposing that it’s fine, Shiro holds his breath. He doesn’t let it go again until Laura patches in a guy with soft brown skin and black plastic glasses without any upper rims. A mop of unruly, sandy blond hair halos around his pointy, patrician features. Seeing Adam on the screen—hearing him throw out his greetings and cuss a bit about his computer jerking him around—Shiro can’t help gasping. It’s soft, and it doesn’t come in hard enough for his lungs to actually give him a pang of pain in protest. Even so, Shiro didn’t expect to see Adam’s face around today. Not that it’s _bad_, seeing him?

It isn’t even that bad, hearing Adam’s low whistle and watching him shake his head in disbelief. “Holy _shit_,” he whispers in the sort of awe that, if anyone cares what Shiro thinks, is probably better suited to seeing Van Gogh’s _The Starry Night_ in person. “You weren’t kidding when you said you looked different.”

But now that Adam’s here, in front of him? Now that this unexpected arrival has actually crashed into Shiro’s realm? The words that Shiro ought to have… The responses that he planned on, assuming that Laura would add her sister to the call, or maybe Amy, since she’s on a business trip in Vancouver right now… The witticisms that might make everything feel so much more within his control, especially his own mind… Everything dies in his throat.

Which doesn’t help verify that Shiro actually is who his Skype profile claims.

Which, all up, makes Shiro grateful that Adam needles him with, “Are you sure you didn’t get body-snatched?”

Shrugging, Shiro supposes, “Would it even matter if I were sure? Body-snatcher species wouldn’t survive if people noticed them.”

“Are we gonna go full _Blade Runner _on this discussion?”

“That’s about androids, though. And unless someone has the capacity to make androids who get Hanahaki—”

“Wait, what? You’ve finally got Hanahaki? Are you _sure_ that you’re—”

“It’s for Keith. My flare-up, I mean.”

Thank God, that makes Adam sigh in relief and accept Shiro as himself. He can’t deal with going over any proofs. Even answering some kind of security question sounds like too much effort. It’s much easier—and so much nicer—to slip back into chattering with Adam and Laura as if they aren’t separated from each other by several hundred miles and the threat of Skype giving out on them at any moment. Catching up on what they’re all up to, these days. Trading anecdotes about what everyone’s life has thrown their way lately. Placing low-key bets that no one means to keep, all about what Clea Duvall and Laverne Cox might get up to in _Blooming Beautiful_’s third season, whenever Netflix decides to release it.

By the time Keith gets home, the conversation’s shuffled on to the ten-year class reunion back in Connecticut. More specifically, as Keith grouses about being hungry and ambles through shoving some leftover pizza in the microwave, Shiro has to defend his choice to skip that exercise in reopening old wounds for no reason, visiting with the people who bullied him for no payoff, and enduring pain for no actual purpose. On one hand, Laura and Adam get the point pretty quickly: Shiro doesn’t want to go, not even to show off his abs and let everyone from Glazek High see that he lost weight after all. Thankfully, Adam and Laura understand that Shiro has more than enough reason for abstaining.

On the other hand, as Adam points out, “But we’re both going. And I think Laura’s bringing Amy?”

She nods. “I’ve been out on Facebook for _how_ many years at this point? No sense in pretending I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“If I had someone to bring, I’d be dragging him with me, too.”

Shiro starts to say something, but drops the thought without uttering a syllable. He _could_ speak freely—this conversation is a sort of safe space, so there’s no judgment to worry about—but Keith pulls a chair over to sit beside Shiro. Huffing softly, he wriggles up close to Shiro’s side. He butts his head at Shiro’s bicep until Shiro slides an arm around his shoulder and kisses his forehead. Down on the screen, both Adam and Laura look like they want to coo and _“awww”_ about this, but they restrain themselves.

“Not for nothing, guys?” Keith shrugs and tears off a bite of his pizza. He could moan around it, which would be nicer—but then again, probably not the best thing to do while they’re on Skype with two friends who didn’t ask to be drawn into their kink. “Look, I know that travel isn’t cheap or anything… But why are we ignoring the fact that Shiro and I are getting a pretty big payday?”

Shiro musses a hand over Keith’s hair. “I’m not sure I follow, Baby?”

Lifting his head just enough to give Shiro a thoroughly unimpressed expression, Keith sighs. “The commission that we need to shoot.”

Gulping, Shiro shrugs. He hopes that he doesn’t look as mentally vacant as he feels. “Still not sure I follow?”

Down on the screen, Adam and Laura both raise their bemused protests. Which is slightly encouraging, at least in that Shiro isn’t alone in feeling completely lost right now. But whatever he’s feeling about this, Keith sighs indulgently and kisses the tip of Shiro’s nose. Unfortunately, the smile he lights up on Shiro’s face doesn’t stop Adam and Laura from going, _“Awww” _and making Shiro blush—but Keith’s impish grin looks so sweet that nothing else matters.

“I settled on the price with our client. It’s a couple thousand dollars. More than enough.” Butting his forehead at Shiro’s, Keith explains, “So, why don’t the three of you have your own reunion? Pick a weekend that works for everybody, then you send them the money for the tickets. You don’t even need to put anyone up in a hotel. The two of us already sleep together. If we ask him nicely, Hunk can crash upstairs with Ryou, Lance, and Allura.”

A chorus of agreement comes up from the laptop. Sure, there are a few snags left to unfurl and details left to hammer out—in fact, most of the details need to get sorted—but it’s nice to have an idea in mind. An idea and some kind of plan. Before he can think better of it, Shiro sighs in relief.

Wincing leads to coughing. Coughing spews a heap of azaleas all over the table, the floor, and worst of all, Keith’s lap. As he cleans them up, Shiro counts eleven fully formed blossoms—but it doesn’t matter. Not when everything’s going so well for once. Not when Keith reaches down to brush Shiro’s bangs off his forehead and tucks them behind his ear, and the way Keith shifts tugs his t-shirt up his belly. Not when a little sliver of Keith’s skin stays visible because he decides not to tug the hem back down and looking at it, Shiro’s mouth goes dry.

More than anything else, though? The looming commission makes everything else fade out of Shiro’s mind, even as he’s hanging up his Skype call and promising to keep in touch. He doesn’t mean to get lost in his own head—he _doesn’t_— and there are so many important things that need his attention.

But Shiro has to top today. Not with Keith riding him, either. No matter how much Keith smiles at him, Shiro can’t shake off the feeling that everything is close to perfect and, within the next ninety minutes, he’s going to irreparably screw it up.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The whole premise of the video that Sheith shoot in this chapter is basically emotional hurt/comfort where body image issues lead to reassurance and sex. Before they shoot it, there’s a somewhat similar moment between them outside of their Akira and Sable characters, where Shiro is the one getting insecure and psyching himself out, and Keith provides some SoftTM affection and love to get Shiro ready to go.
> 
> Also, it’s bottom!Keith. Some feedist-flavored dirty talk and body worship.

Nothing about the commission that they need to film this afternoon is intricate or difficult. As Keith skulks into his room to check the cameras, Shiro should be fine. As Keith gets dressed up in too-small clothes, Shiro should keep his wits about him with no trouble whatsoever. As Keith moans behind his closed door, getting himself prepped for the afternoon’s main event, Shiro shouldn’t feel like he could faint if he isn’t careful.

Except Shiro’s on broken glass and tenterhooks as he waits for his turn. He fusses with the hem of his tight t-shirt but can’t get his nerves to settle down. Smooths his hands over his painted-on black jeans but can’t get find a way to steady himself. Any minute now, Keith’s going to poke his head out and ask why Shiro’s heart is beating so loudly that the neighbors might finally going to call their super and file a noise complaint about the amateur porn stars next-door.

Nothing about the story that they’re doing for this clip is tangled, muddled up, or convoluted. Addressing an unseen audience, Akira will talk dirty about his body. About his weight. About all the changes that he’s noticed to his body. Specifically, he’s going to disparage and insult himself, a game of self-inflicted humiliation, until Shiro hits his limit for hearing Keith talking about himself so negatively. Once he’s ready, Sable enters. He showers Akira with praise, affection, and love, then dicks him into the mattress.

Except the care that Keith and Shiro took to make everything straightforward does nothing to help steady Shiro’s nerves or get his mind off of the fact that they are directly getting paid for their first time having anything but oral sex.

Nothing about this shoot is complicated—except for everything that_ is_.

Pacing around outside Keith’s room, Shiro forces himself to breathe as deeply as he can. He tries to cough more azalea petals into a bag, as if that might banish whatever all is going on inside of him, making this process even more difficult when it _doesn’t need to be_. Yet, instead of the chills that come with Hanahaki hacking, Shiro only feels flushed and warm and slightly nauseated. Ducking into the bathroom for a hot second, Shiro washes off his face and fixes his ponytail. He doesn’t pin his bangs back, in case Keith wants to play with them later.

Inhaling deeply, Shiro glances at the space between the sink and the toilet. He drums his fingertips on the counter, stares at his reflection and wonders what the Hell he’s thinking. Why the Hell he’s thinking it. How any of what his brain tells him is meant to help and where he gets off trusting himself about this when Shiro’s own thoughts and assumptions have only led him astray before. Has he learned absolutely nothing from all the other times that he’s screwed up by relying on his brain, recently?

As expected, the thin, high-cheeked pretty boy who blinks back at him doesn’t have any useful answers for Shiro.

“What good are you anyway,” he mutters. “Shouldn’t you have _some_ notion…”

Why is this idea even coming to him now; Shiro _knows_ better.

At least, he’s _supposed_ to know better. He’s supposed to have been _working_ on all the tangled, messy feelings that rocket around his skull… He sees Ulaz, he goes to therapy, he listens to all of the suggestions that are meant to help him on the path toward being his best and healthiest self, the Shiro that he most wants to be… That Shiro wouldn’t let something as ridiculous as fear drive him to throw out so much progress…

But in spite of this knowledge, Shiro closes the door. As if on autopilot, he twists the lock. He shuffles over to stand before the scale. His old enemy. Still not anything that he’d willingly call a friend. He hasn’t stepped on one since he last saw Dr. Carter, since he weighed in at two-fifteen and they decided that he wasn’t going to lose any more weight, no matter how much part of him still wants that. Because he doesn’t _need_ to lose more weight. Because everything telling him that he does? It’s part of the cluster of problems that Shiro needs to banish from his life.

No, he didn’t hit the goal weight that he originally had in mind—but he got his body into better shape than he ever thought possible. He fixed his health problems. Fought against the insurmountable odds that he’d created for himself. Chasing after one-ninety-five would have undermined all the hard work that Shiro did in the name of _wellness_, if not outright destroyed so much of his progress, and the number on the scale doesn’t matter as much as Shiro used to think. Dragging his hands back through his bangs, he slouches against the wall. Tries to keep his breathing deep, and slow, and steady, and even. Tries to ground himself in the smoothness of his hair beneath his fingertips, in the smell of that peppermint air-freshener plug-in that Hunk insisted on putting in here after Lotor gave it to him.

Shiro glares at the scale and wishes that he had an epic telling-off that he could mutter at it. Wishes that he had anything to say for himself. Not that it _matters_ because the scale cannot _actually_ hear him—but it might feel good, telling that demonic thing exactly where it can shove its hold on him.

He can _feel_ the important things, the changes in him that _really_ mean something: the way he can take the stairs and walk more than a few blocks without getting winded; the way that his knees no longer scream bloody murder at him for putting too much weight on them; the way that he doesn’t strain and struggle to do a single push-up; the way that his stomach only brushes the floor when he _wants_ it to, these days, no longer flopping around, disgusting flab bulging all over everywhere, too big and heavy for it to make any difference that Shiro pulled his abdominal muscles in as tightly as he could.

Inhaling sharply, Shiro whips around toward the bathroom door and fumbles at the lock until it comes undone. Throwing himself out into the apartment, he barely remembers to flick the lights off. Hugging himself, he leans against the wall by Keith’s bedroom and puts everything he has into breathing like someone who cares whether or not he stays alive—because he _does_ care about that. Shiro needs to stay alive. Needs to hang on to this life for all its worth, now that he’s healthy enough to enjoy it (maybe, theoretically, at some point in the future).

He doesn’t know how long he spends slumped against the wall and waiting. But before _too_ long, Keith gently clears his throat. When Shiro opens his eyes, Keith’s right there at his side, rubbing his shoulder and turning those blue-violet eyes up at Shiro with so much raw, earnest belief that Shiro’s heart writhes in his chest, all caught up in a perfect storm of guilt. As Keith squeezes his elbow, Shiro’s cheeks flare up, hot and probably a brilliant shade of strawberry, and his heart tries to plummet out of him.

“Kashi?” Keith’s grip is soft, but Shiro can’t question the intent behind it. He keeps his eyes fixed square on Shiro’s face. “Are you okay? You aren’t, I dunno—we can do this another time, if you don’t want—”

“I’m fine, Baby,” Shiro tells him, choking down a sigh and letting himself reach over to brush some of Keith’s hair back off his face. “Had a moment of weakness just now, but—” As Keith’s hand clamps down on him, Shiro can’t help sighing. He winces for the effort—but he looks Keith in the eye. He promises, “I didn’t do anything to myself, okay? I had a moment of feeling like I had to check the scale. But I talked myself out of it.”

Tuning out the pangs of protest that go through his lips, Shiro forces a smile. “The exact number isn’t important, right? Doesn’t mean anything about who I am, or what kind of person I am, or how good I am at anything?”

“Definitely not, but…” Despite that nod and ostensible agreement, Keith squishes himself up against Shiro’s front. Twisting his fingers up in Shiro’s white fringe, he doesn’t seem to register that Shiro’s arms slither around his thick waist. All he does is watch Shiro’s face and ask, “D’you want to talk about what made you feel like you _needed_ to check?”

“It was stupid—”

“Well, I still want to hear it. Y’know, if you _want_ to tell me.”

Taking a deep breath, Shiro leans his cheek into Keith’s touch.

“Worried about making sure you get the first time with me that you deserve,” he confesses, nuzzling at Keith’s palm. “Let my head get the better of me instead of centering myself and trusting what I know.”

Keith frowns bemusedly. “If we’re talking about this? Then I think I deserve to hear which thing you’ve got in mind.”

“Just that the number I see isn’t important. It means nothing about my health or who I am.” As if sealing the most solemn vow, Shiro squeezes Keith’s hand and kisses the center of his palm—then gives his boy an affectionate, mischievous smile. “Besides, you were into me when I was fat. So, I’m not itching to gain the weight back, but—”

“But this doesn’t sound like it’s exactly _relevant_? Y’know, to your _health_?”

Without letting go of Keith’s hand, Shiro kisses him on the forehead. “Isn’t happiness an essential part of getting relatively healthy?” He squeezes Keith’s palm and smiles as if he’s holding the most precious person in the universe, because he is. “Happiness like what I’ve got when I’m with you?”

Which makes a scarlet blush erupt all over Keith’s pudgy cheeks. When Shiro nuzzles at it, Keith ducks his chin. He huddles close to Shiro’s chest, as if some horrible monster wants to get him—something deadlier than the ones in Shiro’s own mind, anyway—and Keith’s too tired to defend himself.

“We’ve got work to do, Kashi,” he mumbles against Shiro’s Adam’s apple. “But you make me happy, too, okay?”

* * *

_“Soft Uncertainty.” Akira’s been letting himself go so much lately that he almost can’t believe it! He used to be so fit and skinny, but that slim, athletic boy has disappeared as he’s allowed himself to blubber out. Fortunately, when Sable overhears Akira discussing his newfound insecurities about his gains, he’s ready to prove how much he loves every inch of plush, jiggly fat that’s blossomed on Akira’s body. Features fat talk and belly play, insecurity, body worship, and anal (Akira on bottom)._

* * *

However much Shiro made him blush, Keith slips right into work mode as soon as Shiro gets their cameras rolling. With a few deep breaths, he gets himself centered. Pulls Akira Crimson out from his bag of mental tricks and pouts so earnestly that, if Shiro didn’t know better, he’d believe Keith’s only being being himself. If he hadn’t helped Keith work on the idea for this clip—if he didn’t know how Keith really feels about his body—Shiro would think that glimmer of shame and regret in his boyfriend’s eyes is completely legit.

“Hey, everybody,” Keith sighs, resting one hand over his stomach. The deep hollow of his belly-button is clearly visible through the fabric of his t-shirt, and he teases his fingers around that hole as he says, “It’s me, Akira. In case you didn’t know. But, I mean? Why would you be here if you don’t.”

Flopping down, he makes the bedspring creak. Hopefully, the mics positioned near the mattress will pick that up, because Shiro’s chest clenches up with longing over hearing that sound. Similar noises always used to make him feel sick, proof that he was fat, and miserable, and only getting fatter, no matter what he did. But _Keith_… Oh, he makes a noisy bedspring sound like Heaven. He makes his mattress dip lower than it should, thanks to some creative jimmy-rigging, which plays up how much weight he’s put on lately. Even if someone doesn’t think his extra pounds look like much, they can’t argue with the way the room reacts to Keith, the way his body stresses anything that dreams of containing him.

As part of the game, Keith heaves on each breath, trying to come off like _any_ movement leaves him winded. Yet, he’s perfectly clear as he tries to tease, “Not like this gut could belong to anybody else, though, right?”

It perfectly fits one of the patterns that he likes for teasing: baiting the audience with the knowledge of how much he loves his chub. Acting cocky and unaffected—but there’s something too tight about his voice. His grin wobbles like he’s desperate to keep it up. Pushing his palm into his soft flab, Keith forces a laugh that sounds like glass cracking.

Finally, patting his stomach, he slouches and ducks his chin.

Softly, he says, “I mean, who else would let themselves go as bad as I have?”

Watching from the desk would be preferable, if you ask Shiro. He’d have a full-frontal view of Keith playing up this aspect of his character, this idea of someone whose weight gain gives them more trouble than freedom. Better yet, if Shiro could perch on the desk, he’d get the best view of Keith’s tummy, bulging out from his too-snug t-shirt in a cascade of luscious, pale, pudgy rolls. He’d get to see what the center-camera sees, what Keith’s subscribers will see when they pay for this clip.

Not that the side-view leaves anything to be desired. Still, leaning against the door-frame, Shiro holds back on a sigh because he could be looking at Keith head-on. He could watch Keith’s stomach surge forward as he lets out a sigh so heavy, it sounds downright painful. He _could _drink in the way that Keith’s belly-fat gives way underneath his hand, and the way that his flesh wobbles as he gives his ample midsection a shake.

But, no. Not right now. They’re working, and Shiro needs to stay in his character. In the moment. When Keith braces himself on his palms, slouching so the center-camera gets a good shot of his chub pooching out onto his thighs, Shiro can’t allow himself to gasp because Sable wouldn’t gasp. Even with the way Keith’s soft flesh squishes as he moves, Sable wouldn’t make a sound. Largely because Sable isn’t supposed to be here, right now.

No matter how much Shiro wants to run in headlong and be with Keith _right now_, he needs to hold off for now. Sable needs to play the angel who swoops in when he overhears Akira telling his subscribers—

“I’ve just been thinking, y’know? About all of this?”

By way of illustrating what he means, Keith lifts the rolls of flab along his middle. Unceremoniously, he drops them. Ripples course through his flesh, jiggling in a way that makes Shiro’s insides twist with _want _and sludges up his throat with all the noises that he’s holding back.

“There’s kind of a lot of weight to me, these days. Y’know what I mean?”

Shiro doesn’t gasp over the resonant _thunk! _when Keith smacks his midsection and makes his paunch bounce.

“Look at this,” Keith huffs at the center-camera, almost indignant and arching his back _just so_. He poses so his chub sticks out further than he‘d allow, if he were genuinely ashamed of anything about his body. “Over fifty pounds from where I started. Over sixty-_five_ pounds. I mean, I haven’t weighed myself lately? I probably should, ‘cause this is probably getting way more out-of-hand than I already know. I _must _have gotten even bigger…”

Shiro doesn’t let himself sigh when Keith edges the hem of his t-shirt up, or when he pinches the biggest, thickest part of his lower belly, squishing it between both hands and giving his pudge a good, hard shake. Regardless of how much Shiro wants to give Keith encouragement—regardless of how he could simply ignore this part of his own audio track when he gets to the editing—Shiro can’t risk drawing Keith out of the moment. Can’t risk distracting him or throwing him off his game. Can’t risk the huge mess that might come if he—

“There’s _so much_ of me to go around, anymore. I’ve got no idea how anybody can even stand it.” Even this side of Akira has his roots more in fantasy than anything else, Keith sells it. His eyes go wide as he strokes a hand up and down his middle, pressing into his flesh without lingering to fully squish any piece of himself. “I mean, my _friends_ don’t really say anything about it? They’re all trying to be polite, I guess. But I’ve seen the other people looking at me, y’know? How could they do anything _but_ look at me. I don’t really give anyone the option _not_ to…”

Shiro doesn’t give himself the privilege of whining when Keith splays his hands over his pudgy sides and shoves his flab forward. That pressure builds in Shiro’s throat. The_ longing_ claws at his Adam’s apple and the inside of his chest. But he tightens his grip, digs his fingers against the edge of the door-frame, and steels himself. He’ll get his hands all over Keith’s body in due time. Patience. Perseverance. Endurance. Restraint… That’s all Shiro needs to rely on. He only needs to focus and tap into his capacity for holding out and waiting for the better reward. No running into the open arms of instant gratification, not today.

Patience, and focus, and a single iota of self-control. He should be _good_ at this, by now.

While Keith makes up an anecdote about some run-in with an older couple at the bookstore, Shiro digs his bicep against the door-frame. Keeps himself grounded with the feeling of the wood pressing at his muscle. Keeps his mind tuned in to Keith’s voice and his tale, how he’d just gotten on shift and hadn’t put his apron on yet, and his shirt was so terribly tight…

While Keith rabbits on at the camera about how all he wanted to do was help them carry their bags and he got the _dirtiest looks ever_ out of them for even offering his help, Shiro keeps his gaze locked on his boyfriend. Closing his eyes might let him disappear into his own head too easily. Might let him imagine what these non-existent horrid customers looked like, how they sneered at Keith and stared at his magnificent belly, at the way his t-shirt’s hem couldn’t stay down by his waistband, where it belongs…

While Keith pouts, lips quivering while he looks down at his stomach, Shiro has to look away. Even with a rush of lust snaking through the pit of his stomach, his heart lurches more from the sight that Keith cuts. His nerves scream out for Shiro to get in there. Run to Keith’s side and go help him, because what if he _isn’t_ really acting? What if he’s genuinely upset about this? What if he _needs_ some tender loving care—

“I kinda can’t believe what’s _happened_ to my body, getting like this, either? All this weight, and putting it on so _quickly_, like I have…”

Keith cuts back in right when Shiro needs his intervention. When he _most _needs to hear his boyfriend’s voice and get himself grounded back in the moment. Away from all the thoughts about feelings that Keith and Shiro have already negotiated over. He _knows_ that Keith is in control over this situation, that he’s only saying things he’s comfortable with… If Keith didn’t want to squeeze his belly—if he didn’t want to slap his flesh and set it wobbling all over—then he simply wouldn’t do it.

Pinching up the roll of chub above his belly-button, Keith sighs. “I never used to have any fat like this. Before I started porking up, I was, like? Nobody ever would’ve guessed that I could fall so far, not when I was the high school soccer star… All thin and lithe and pointy…”

Dimly, Shiro wonders if he should gather up some of Keith’s pics from college. They could do a photo-shoot inspired by all the shots of him at parties, or lazing around the student lounge, or doing his stage-combat class out on the quad, or whichever else. Not today, obviously. Probably not next weekend, either. But sometime soon… They could get Keith to put on his old clothes—as many of them as he still has, anyway, and close equivalents for the ones that they can’t find—and put him in those old poses, and sell the side-by-side comparisons… Let people pay them to see how slim Keith used to be, directly juxtaposed to how big he’s gotten, now—

“Hell, I was downright _skinny_ for most of my life,” Keith drawls like he can’t decide whether or not he wants to grumble. “Even having muscle, when I did? I still looked like a damn toothpick. Because it never showed up on my body. Not like all of _this_…”

Huffing, Keith smacks his belly. A dull crack, right on the side, and it sends tremors throughout his chub. Regardless of the t-shirt prison that his beautiful bulk is trapped in, at the moment, Keith’s flesh moves so much that nobody could miss it. The jiggle makes his t-shirt’s hem inch up ever further, threatening to expose more of his bulk—then making good on that promise when Keith slouches. His gut swells out further, spilling past the fabric that struggles to contain it and nudging up against his thighs.

“I didn’t even gain the freshman fifteen when I started college.”

Not a lie, and Shiro nibbles on his lower lip, trying not to think about how thin Keith was, back then. Trying not to jump the gun on comparing his slim hips and toned midsection to the plump, plush fullness that’s settled so comfortably on Keith’s frame.

Oblivious—or perhaps more focused than Shiro’s managing, right now—Keith wriggles like he’s trying to work a knot out of his back. Shakes his belly and passes it off as a side-effect of how he simply can’t tell how much weight he’s really gained, how he’s getting used to his new weight. Shiro may know better, but other people might not recognize what Keith is doing, and this kind of detail brings the whole picture into clearer relief. Makes these movements seem more like _Akira_ than like _Keith_, even when .

“Everybody I know put on weight in college. _Everybody_,” Keith goes on, squirming on the mattress like he can’t get comfortable. “Maybe they didn’t all get _fat_ or anything? But they got on the all-you-can-eat dorm food, or the keg parties, or the all-night pizza binges. So, they chunked up at least a little bit. They _hated_ the fact that I could eat whatever I want and never gain an ounce.”

Keith pauses as if he’s considering that story, which isn’t entirely untrue. He’s stretched the truth and embellished slightly? But it’s still a more or less accurate retelling of what happened.

Instead, he blows at his bangs and adds, “Well, except for this one friend of mine who can’t gain, even when he honestly kinda needs to. He didn’t hate me then? But he’s getting pretty sick of me since I started getting fat. Skinny little shit.”

Shiro inhales sharply. Silently, he curses himself for that. Good thing Lance will never see this clip. He _could_, in theory, but he probably won’t go looking or won’t want to pay for the privilege if he does. In turn, this means that Lance will never have a chance to get upset about how Keith referenced him in their porn.

“But, like? I kept everything together. I kept _myself_ together. Kept everything in control… I didn’t even slip up a little bit. Until _now_, I mean.”

Rolling his eyes, Keith groans like he’s trying too hard to seem exasperated. Whether it’s genuinely Keith or meant to be Akira, Shiro can’t completely tell—but it doesn’t matter when Keith thwacks his palm into the side of his gut once more.

“And at first, I really didn’t _mind_ that I was getting bigger?” Keith twitches his wrist, jerks his hand against his stomach, jostles all of that chub so much that the ripples go up to his softened chest. “It was _nice_ to not be freezing cold all the time. And I wasn’t arguing with what happened to my ass. Like, it wasn’t a _bad_ ass, before I started getting chubby? But it didn’t have enough substance to it, with how firm it was? There wasn’t enough to grab, and I was _so crazy _for finally having some junk in the trunk.”

Staring right at the center camera, Keith grabs up the biggest roll of belly-fat he can get. “Should’ve been careful what I wished for, huh?”

The way Keith’s flesh trembles sends a hot shock through Shiro’s chest. The tangled up mess of _something_ in his chest can’t decide what it wants: to run in and comfort Keith, or to hang back and listen. There’s so much ground that Keith could cover, so much more that he could say—

“It’s not even all about the way that people look at me, though? The mood I’m in, tonight?” Keith stretches, raising his arms and dragging his t-shirt’s hemline all the way up to his belly-button. He groans, rolling out his shoulders. When he drops his hands back to the mattress, he doesn’t bother to tug his shirt back down. “I’m not even really upset about all the weight, I guess? I mean, I could’ve _stopped_ myself, right? I could’ve gone back to the gym at any time… Cut back on sweets, and carbs, and all those luscious, fatty calories I love so much…”

_And it still might not have worked_, Shiro keeps to himself because it’s about as helpful as ten-pound brick smacking into his forehead.

Anyway, it doesn’t help him with the impulse to dart in _right now _and get his hands all over Keith’s body.

But Keith decides to demonstrate what he means. Part of what he means, at least. Chest heaving and cheeks puffing up, he scoots back to his headboard. Slumping against it, he gasps as if he’s genuinely exhausted. As if he’s so weighed down by his own body that he can’t catch his breath. As if he’s completely gone to seed while packing on the pounds and every newfound roll of padding has taken a ten-ton toll on his health.

Watching him move—watching the way his belly jerks back and surges forward, the way his flesh begs for someone to reach out and grab it—Shiro nearly shuts his eyes so that vision can’t make him hard too quickly. Choking down that rush of lust, he reminds himself that holding off will let him and Keith enjoy each other more when the time _really_ comes. Gripping the door-frame, he forces his lungs to behave, to keep taking in oxygen without spasming like they might decide to turn into whole gardens, not just a single Hanahaki flare-up. God, he can’t interrupt this by hacking those obnoxious petals all over the room. Not when Keith’s doing such good work. Not when he’s making it seem like—

“Never used to be this _hard_… Y’know what I mean?” Head lolling back, Keith lets himself whine. He strokes up and down his middle, jostling his fat-rolls so gently that you’d miss the jiggle if you looked away for half-a-second. “I wasn’t just _thin_ before, I was an athlete. I won the MVP award so many times when I was in high school. For soccer _and_ for track. I used to be able to run an eight-minute mile. I only didn’t win Most Athletic or Most Likely To Stay In Shape back in senior year because the yearbook’s a popularity contest and nobody liked me enough to vote for me.”

Not as true a statement as it could be—but Shiro smiles anyway, remembering how Keith won _Most Likely To Fight The Sun_. True back then, still true now, and no matter how big Keith ever wants to get, it will probably remain true.

In the meantime, Keith spreads his legs like he’s ready to get fucked. Bends them up enough to show off some of his body’s softest flesh. Angles himself toward the center-camera so his legs look even bigger than they are.

God, if Shiro were over by the desk, he’d have a perfect view of the action while Keith pats up and down his flabby inner thighs. He’d get to watch the fabric of Keith’s boxer-briefs wrinkle up around his legs, retreating like it’s terrified, pushed back and crumpling under the pressure of containing Keith’s bulk. He’d _see it_ when Keith tap-tap-taps his fingers against that expanse of plush, yielding pudge. When he sends ripples cascading through his increasingly dimpled chub, makes his thighs tremble all over and makes it seem like he’s lost all the muscle that he ever had, pouts over the easy jiggle in his thigh-meat as if he hasn’t mentioned wanting Shiro to leave hickeys on it, not today but at some point in the future.

“Legs like these? Never would’ve thought I could have them.” Gaze locked on the center camera, he smacks one of his thighs with a dull _thunk!_—and Shiro bites his own knuckles to keep from gasping.

Ostensibly unperturbed, Keith goes on, “Maybe you can’t see it really well by now? But God, these blown-up, fleshy thighs chafe up like a _motherfucker_. They wear out my inseams pretty much as soon as I squeeze into some brand new jeans. All this chub, I can’t exactly help it. Walking around the block is, like, an _experience_. Like, my legs always knock each other around, now. And they _hurt_, now. Trying to go up the stairs, when I can’t catch an elevator? I can _feel_ the groaning in my thighs. And my _knees_. Like my whole body’s _protesting _against me doing anything because I didn’t stop myself from stuffing my greedy face, and now, I’m just too big. For anything and too big for any_body_.”

Dropping his legs, Keith sighs. The flesh along his thighs might not be as visible for the cameras, now. But he exposes the plump mound of his stomach, pooled out near his thighs and pushing his t-shirt up all over again. About half of his belly-button peeks past the hem. Rolling his eyes, Keith plays like he’s genuinely tugging the shirt down where it’s supposed to hit. He could put in more effort, but he’s trying to play up how there’s too much of him to squeeze inside this cotton-blend prison.

“This belly’s even worse than anything else,” Keith says, jostling his stomach. Pushing his shirt’s hem up ever-so-slightly further. “God, there’s just so much of it? I don’t know if I miss having my abs, not _really_. There’s still so much to deal with that I didn’t see coming when I started letting myself pork out, though…” Pouting, he forces a dispirited shrug. “Like, I get winded before I’m even halfway up to my apartment. Not like I’ve been taking _any_ stairs lately or for the past six months? But I tried to go up them, the other day—I wanted to prove that I still _could_—and I tried to _run_? I thought, like, ‘Well, if I move real quickly, then I can’t think too much about how my thighs rub up on each other. Then, feeling them won’t be so bad, right?’”

Even in profile, Keith’s scowl makes that answer obvious: No, not right.

“Trying to move like that? It knocked my thighs all over each other. I thought they’d bruise, for sure. I was just trying to get up the stairs, trying not to think about anything? But every step made my legs wobble around. Moving fast, it got them banging around. You know why they call them, ‘thunder thighs,’ right?” A mischievous glimmer flashes in Keith’s eyes. But before Shiro can think about it too much, Keith melts back into sulking. “It’s ‘cause they sound like rolls of thunder when you move them. How could I _not_? With _these_ freaking flabby fat-rolls—”

Demonstrating what he means, Keith lifts the inside of one leg off the mattress. Shakes his chub and gives the center-camera a view of how his flesh wobbles. Shiro grinds his shoulder against the edge of Keith’s door, willing himself to stay on his feet. Biting his lip because _no_, he cannot get hard yet, because Keith needs him to focus on the clip they’re making, on maintaining his character as well as possible, on doing the damn work. Which is all a great idea—

—But it’d be easier if the _damn work_ didn’t plague Shiro with a need to leave hickeys on every inch of Keith’s fleshy legs.

“Everyday stuff’s gotten weird for me, too,” Keith says, sinking a hand deep into his belly like he can’t tell how much Shiro’s dying, not even twenty feet away from him. “I didn’t used to mind walking around the bookstore on my shifts? But it’s getting to be a lot, you know? Sure, people try not to stare at me, I can’t help the way my hips wiggle. I don’t _waddle_—not yet, I mean? Or not unless I’ve had _way_ too much for lunch? God, the way that I’ve been gaining, I’ll be waddling like a tubby, fat-ass penguin before anybody knows what’s up—”

Grinding his teeth, Shiro chokes down a groan. His cock twitches insistently, but _Jesus_, he can’t have that happening right now. But he _also_ doesn’t need the thought of Keith, _his_ Keith, bigger and softer and chubbier than ever… With his full, voluptuous hips and his plumped up peach of an ass tearing any jeans he wears apart, those enormous thighs threatening to rip even stretchy yoga pants to shreds… And whenever he walks, he won’t have enough room to really put one foot in front of the other, he’ll need to shuffle around… His hips will sway more than they do now, and his flesh will sway back and forth in long, slow motions, and Shiro _cannot_ think about this right now, when he’s trying _not_ to get hard—

“Guess I can’t _blame_ anyone for staring, though.” Keith’s voice cuts back in, derailing Shiro’s thoughts right in the nick of time. “Even if they didn’t know me back when I was skinny? It’s not like I can hide a belly like this. Even my biggest clothes don’t hide it. Look at how freaking _huge_ it’s getting, okay?”

As if it makes some unfathomable point, Keith pushes his belly fat out toward the camera again. “Whenever I move, my belly finds some way to _jiggle_. Doesn’t matter whether that makes sense to me or not, whether that feels _fair_ or not…”

He jostles both hands against his paunch, makes little earthquakes shudder through his flab. “I mean, I know that _Sable_ doesn’t mind me gaining weight. Or at least he _says_ he doesn’t mind it. Still, it’s one thing for him to get his hands all over my body when we’re alone together.”

With a huff, Keith flips his bangs back off his face. He grumbles, “But it’s totally another thing for other people to gawk at me while my stomach bulges and sloshes around like a balloon that’s full of melted ice cream. And even if they don’t _know _how I wound up this way? It’s not like they can’t guess. Anyone who jiggles as much as I do? Probably blubbered out in one way, only.”

Groaning, Keith slouches. Arches his back so his belly flops out further into his lap than it’s done since he got started. He wriggles like he’s trying to get comfortable and his stomach’s chubby underside drags along the fabric of his underwear. The hem of his t-shirt bunches up at the place where his true waist dips in, covering his belly-button and leaving his lower roll of paunch exposed. Angry red stretch-marks stand out, stark stripes on Keith’s swath of pale pudge, and he blushes darker as he traces one of them with his fingertips.

Keith’s sigh comes out ponderous and heavy. “God, these splotches totally support whatever anybody thinks. When they look at me, they’re _bound_ to be thinking, ‘Oh wow, what a huge, lazy tub of lard. How can any person let themself go so badly? How much face-stuffing did you do to get so big? ‘Cause with all that fat you’ve got on you, Fat-Boy? There’s no way in Hell that you are _naturally_ that huge.’”

Shiro keeps his lips pursed tightly. He doesn’t gasp, but he can’t ignore the twist of recognition that jolts down his spine. Digging his spine along the edge of the door-frame, Shiro manages to keep himself grounded. Manages to keep from running right to Keith’s side and jumping right into the comfort-sex. Whether or not Keith’s deliberately drawn on things that Shiro’s said about himself before, everything he tells the camera hits far too close to home. Shiro’s nerves and muscles burn with a need to _do something_, to go be there for Keith because he should _never_ need to feel that way about himself—

“Hell, people used to ask me for workout tips or what my diet was.” When Shiro looks back to him, Keith’s let his face go pensive. One hand rests on the fullest crest of his belly while he braces himself with the other. While he sits mostly still, his breaths don’t let his stomach get a break from quivering. “People thought that I _must’ve _had a secret that could help him. They got _so mad_ when I told them that I didn’t diet. Or that I just did whatever at the gym seemed fun. But God, these days?”

Keith ducks his chin and swallows thickly. His cheeks flush scarlet as he admits, “Lately, I’ve started every morning by asking myself, ‘Oh, am I gonna button my jeans _underneath_ my gut, even knowing that this could make them fall off my big, fat ass more easily? Or am I gonna do them up around my waist, even though I could make one false move and bust a button off in public?’ And there _isn’t_ a good answer to that. Not really.”

Pinching at his lower roll of tummy-chub with both hands, Keith huffs. “Then, like the rest of this total mess I’ve made isn’t more than enough already? Porking out like this has made my _appetite_ blow up with me. I don’t even—I mean, come on, right? How could that _not_ happen?”

He gives his middle a firm, hard shake. As his flesh wobbles, he puts on a conspiratorial whisper, tells the center-camera, “Look, none of you talk about this on the message boards, okay? ‘Cause Sable could find it there, and I don’t want him to. Not like I can’t tell him important things? Because I _can_. But I don’t need him knowing, like?”

A sharp breath shocks into Keith. His stomach flops out when he sighs and Shiro can almost hear the smack of flesh on flesh. He’s the picture of abject misery as he says, “I’ve been trying to cut back just a little bit, okay? Like, _maybe_ I can slim down, if I’m _really_ lucky? But I just wanted to try and slow the gaining down… Stabilize at whatever size I am, right now… I don’t think I’m asking myself for a lot, here?”

Shiro’s own breath hitches in his throat. Knowing that Keith would tell this story is worlds different from hearing him do it. From standing over here, wedged against the door-frame, watching while Keith’s eyes glimmer like he could start sobbing at any moment. Listening as Keith takes things that Shiro has actually felt—things that he’s actually done to himself before, things that exacerbated or brought him to so many of his lowest points—and turns them on their ears like this. Turns them around, fashions them into—

“I did really good for breakfast, I thought? I didn’t eat that much. Just an egg white omelette and some raw veggies, the way that Sable eats for breakfast.” Pouting, Keith hunches in on himself as if trying to hide his ample midsection. All he accomplishes is squishing his flesh and making it look that much bigger. “But oh my _God_, I have no idea how he even _lives_ like that? Because barely an hour later, I was at work and I was fucking _starving_. And I told myself _not_ to eat any of the cake that my boss brought in for her birthday? Told myself _not_ to get into the secret stash of snacks I’ve got in my locker? But I… I was so _hungry_, and everything looked so _good_, I couldn’t help…”

Keith cuts himself off with a sniffle. Then, a sharp inhale. He could do so much more, so much worse.

But Shiro bangs on the door-frame before Keith can get all the way to crying. “Akira! Baby, I’m home!”

Gasping, Keith whips around. Seeking Shiro out—or looking for Sable—like he’s about to get caught. Thin trails of tears glisten on his cheeks. It makes Shiro’s heart lurch guiltily in his chest, sends doubts swarming into his mind like locusts… But they’re working. Yes, they enjoy the work. But it’s still work. He can’t get caught up in anything else.

As Shiro advances on the bed, Keith cowers against the headboard. Curls his legs up tight against his middle, as much as he can manage with his pudgy stomach in the way. Bowing his head, Keith trembles, and Shiro’s heart aches as he swoops in to kneel by Keith’s feet. He shushes his Baby softly, rubbing his hand along Keith’s leg, trying to coax him into opening up. Whether his legs or his heart, as long as he lets Shiro into something.

When Shiro peels off that too-small t-shirt, drags that beautiful, chubby belly out into the open, Keith shrinks in on himself all the more—as if he could actually hide his body, curling up like that. His soft, wordless whimper sends a jolt of _need_ right to Shiro’s cock. Which, in turn, makes his stomach turn with guilt all over again. God, Shiro _knows better_. Even if Keith’s only acting, Shiro has genuinely been in similar positions. He was so much bigger than Keith is now when he dealt with moments like this. Watching Keith try to shove his way into a fetal position, Shiro shouldn’t feel this _lust_ stirring in him, shouldn’t dive in for a kiss and huff, offended, when Keith turns his face away.

He shouldn’t roll his eyes when he pulls back, or grumble his way through saying, “Come on… You know I love it when you wear tight shirts like that.”

He should be more sympathetic when Keith shakes his head. “You don’t have to spare my feelings, Sable—”

“Who’s sparing anything? You look so hot, with your tummy all hanging out like this…”

As if it emphasizes his point, Shiro reaches for Keith’s lower roll of belly-fat.

Whining, Keith smacks his hand away. “Don’t lie to me, Babe. How could you like this? I’m _disgusting_—”

“No, you aren’t. You could never be disgusting. Who told you that?”

“Nobody needed to, Sable! I already know, all on my own—”

“Then you know _wrong_. Because none of that sounds right.”

Leaning toward him again makes Keith whisper confessions about what he was telling himself “before” Sable got home. He admits to so many feelings about how he _knows_ that Sable can’t love his body like this, how unfair it is to him when he fell in love with Akira’s skinny body, and all he should get what he deserves: a fit boyfriend… A boyfriend he can take out somewhere nice… A boyfriend he wouldn’t be ashamed of being seen with—

“I fell in love with _Akira_,” Shiro tells him, brushing Keith’s hair back off his face. “I deserve to be with _Akira_. Whatever your shape or size, Baby.”

_That_ gets Keith to yield. Gets him to lower his legs. He slips down to the mattress so easily, melting under Shiro’s touch, following where Shiro guides him. He only holds them up so he can snake his arms around Shiro’s shoulders. He keeps his chin ducked as if genuinely ashamed to let Shiro—_Sable_—see what his body looks like, as if hiding from the reaction because maybe, his doubts have told the truth. Maybe sprawling beneath Sable and letting his partner have him will blow up in his face even more than his waistline has blown up, lately. Maybe this is all an elaborate prank that reality is playing on him, and Sable’s going to turn on him instead of turning him on, going to realize that he doesn’t love Akira’s body after all, going to tell him that it’s over and all of this has been a joke.

(Maybe Shiro is definitely projecting his own old feelings onto whatever Keith’s trying to portray, right now. But as long as he doesn’t interrupt the shoot, then that isn’t anybody’s problem.)

Yet, Keith splays himself out on the mattress like nothing can hurt him. Wriggles until he’s comfortable, ostensibly without regard for how his flesh jiggles. Even with the cameras jimmy-rigged to the headboard and the wall—even knowing that they’re working—Keith slips so far out of Akira’s embarrassed, regretful persona that he might as well drop the act entirely. He yanks Shiro’s shirt off without concern for how it might play later, and he pulls Shiro down as if he’s never felt shame in his life. While Shiro’s abs squish up against his pudge, while Shiro’s toned thighs squeeze around Keith’s chunky legs, Keith kisses on him like he’s starving.

Of course, Shiro kisses back. He throws himself headlong into sucking on Keith’s lips. Opens up so Keith can draw the air out of his lungs. If his Baby’s starving like this, then Shiro will gladly be devoured.

Before Shiro can think about his next move—before he can wonder what he should do or maybe shouldn’t, or what will give Keith his all in the best way, or what might play better from which angles—Keith bucks up at him, soft bulk of his middle colliding with the hard planes of Shiro’s. And Shiro gasps into Keith’s mouth, struck by the contrast between them. By how Keith’s body gives way underneath him, how he sinks into Keith’s warm, soft flesh. Although he wouldn’t call Keith _fat_ (not yet), Shiro’s breath hitches in his throat as Keith’s paunch envelops his body, nestling around his sharp hips and his taut midsection.

“You’re so gorgeous, Baby,” Shiro whispers, slithering over the plush swell of Keith’s middle. “So chubby. So soft…”

“Fucking tease.” Keith grumbles into Shiro’s mouth and kisses him more deeply than ever. He loops one arm around Shiro’s trim waistline, gropes at Shiro’s ass with the other hand, grips him so hard that Shiro almost allows himself to whimper. Embracing him like this could be something easy on Keith’s part, something nice.

Except the growl that Keith lets slip has a ragged, possessive edge to it.

Except he pulls Shiro so flush against him, it’s like Keith wants to drown him in all this doughy, luscious padding.

_God_, though, Shiro doesn’t mind the sound of that. He could get lost in Keith’s body, never come back to the real world, and die a happy man. Not that that’s an option right now, while they’re working on a clip. Yet, as Keith grunts and lifts his thick, flabby thigh—as he jiggles that flesh against Shiro’s firm side and lets that bulk spill out onto Shiro’s back—as Keith tries to keep him pinned down inside the heavenly expanse of his chubby body, Shiro can’t think of any other convincing arguments against disappearing into all Keith’s extra weight.

As he writhes on Keith, those plump rolls of pudge caress Shiro and try so hard to swallow him up. In the dim, back-corners of Shiro’s mind, some part of him wishes that they would.

Swallowing thickly, Shiro nudges his forehead down at Keith’s. Grins at the deep, groaning shudder that wracks Keith’s body and makes his whole torso quiver, all because Shiro bites down on Keith’s lip and worms on Keith’s crotch. Hard and eager, his cock presses against Shiro’s and Keith gasps, every time that Shiro’s hips grind down on his. Twisting _just so_, Shiro even coaxes out a whine.

Doesn’t take long for him to join Keith, either. Stomach rubs up on stomach. Muscles snake against chub. Warmth huddles in on warmth, and as Shiro’s own cock stiffens, his chest burns with a wicked, desperate urge. Hoping to quell that twist of _want want oh god want_, Shiro pulls back from Keith so he can plunge back in. So he can get that rush all over again, the shock of warmth that comes from diving into a more forceful thrust, from the way Keith’s belly-fat engulfs him and wobbles from the impact of Shiro’s hips.

They fall into a rhythm, rutting at each other. But as he jerks Keith’s underwear out of the way, a chill slams into Shiro’s chest. He stops straining against Keith’s plump body. Compliantly twitches his hips and follows Keith’s lead as he fumbles at Shiro’s own jeans, his own shorts. Breathing deeply, Shiro noses at Keith’s cheek without kissing him. Can’t have this look like he’s stopping in the middle of things. Not when that cold feeling must mean that his Hanahaki’s about to ruin all the work that Keith has done so far, spew red azaleas everywhere, and leave them reshooting at least this part of the clip and hoping Shiro can make it cohesive in the editing process.

Except that doesn’t happen. Shiro’s breath hitches again. A groan shakes it loose and Shiro shivers against Keith. But only because Keith curls his fingers around Shiro’s cock, gives him a firm twist and a jerk. No petals come up. By the time he steals another long kiss from Keith, Shiro doesn’t even cough, not once.

“Jesus, Sable,” Keith sighs against his lips. “I’m so ready for you.”

Nodding, Shiro gropes around the bedside table. He doesn’t take his eyes off Keith and knocks Keith’s hairbrush to the floor before his hand finds the lube. He smacks the alarm clock into the wall before he successfully grabs that bottle. While he slicks up his cock, Shiro can’t ignore the determined racing of his heart, or the all-too-familiar feeling of thorns twining themselves tight around his lungs, or the dull, thick rush of his earlier anxiety surging up and digging its claws into his mind.

Shiro gulps and prays it isn’t audible. Keith must notice—why else would he take such special care with tucking Shiro’s bangs behind his ear, with asking if he’s okay? But when Keith bucks up against his hips, squirming beneath Shiro as if trying to egg him on, Shiro can hardly enjoy the feel of Keith’s paunch bulging against his abs. All he can think is, _Dammit, why didn’t we rehearse this?_

Not that Keith’s at fault. He didn’t know about Shiro’s lack of experience with this particular position. Nuzzling at Keith’s forehead, sneaking in another gentle kiss, Shiro doesn’t let himself dwell on how he _could_ have told Keith and chose not to. There’s no going back, now. Nothing to do except look Keith in the eye and—

“Lift your hips for me, Baby?”

Keith obliges without question. The angle he pushes himself into makes his belly droop away from Shiro, toward Keith’s chest. As Shiro fondles a roll of tummy-chub, Keith snorts. “Enjoy it while you _can_, Pretty Boy. Won’t be able to do this for too much longer, at my rate.”

Shiro forces himself to smirk. “Hey, now. Don’t make promises you might not keep.”

With a wry glint in his eyes, Keith smirks like, _I could say the same to you_—which is more than fair enough.

A deep breath to steady himself, to shore up his resolve. Keith spreads his legs even further, pushes the flab on one thigh back so Shiro has a better view of his hole. Dimly, Shiro wants to tease Keith with his cockhead. Wants to linger here and listen to the breathy, gasping sounds that Keith makes for him. But Keith’s still loosened up for him, and his cock’s still slick, and before his head can get the better of him, Shiro thrusts into Keith.

He pushes in slowly, just to be sure that he doesn’t do this wrong. Doesn’t hurt Keith any. His breaths get short as Shiro goes in deeper. But as Keith tightens around his shaft, Shiro can hardly catch his breath at all. Only instinct gets Shiro to edge back, to stop short of pulling out of Keith, to rock into him again and brush his firm stomach against Keith’s erection. Whether Keith’s overselling things or not, Shiro gets a flush of relief from the way Keith’s hand seizes up, the way he digs his fingertips into Shiro’s shoulder-blade.

Shoving aside this haze of self-doubt, Shiro braces himself on one elbow. Keeps his other hand on Keith’s belly, palm gripping onto the chub, jiggling it, sending little earthquake-tremors through Keith’s flesh and inhaling sharply as that warm, soft expanse wobbles against him. Shiro can’t drown in Keith’s chub like he wants right now. Not when he needs to mind his movements, and needs to focus on the here-and-now, and needs to find Keith’s rhythm, to meet him on his own terms, driving into Keith when Keith rocks up into him. This _should_ be easy enough—Shiro was just on top of Keith for the clip that led to them getting together—but his head tries to spin clean off his shoulders, insisting that there’s too much of a difference. Grinding on Keith isn’t the same thing as fucking him.

First time in this position or not, Shiro can’t let on about his nerves. Can’t hold Keith back. Can’t _ruin this entire clip_.

All of which means that Shiro can’t allow himself to think too much. Not when he needs to satisfy Keith but every moan that Keith gives up sounds like he’s humoring Shiro, more than anything. Getting lost in his thoughts instead of in Keith’s body? That would ruin this shoot even more than his Hanahaki rearing its ugly head. Anytime his thoughts rear up, Shiro pushes deeper into Keith—he goes in harder, tries to find all the places in Keith that he’s dreamt of but has never felt before, gives Keith’s belly another shake—and forces himself to think about his girth inside of Keith, about how warm and tight Keith is around his cock. No matter how many ripples his thrusts send through Keith’s chub, Shiro _cannot_ mess this up.

Screwing his courage to the sticking place works, apparently. Shiro forges on, speeding up when Keith keens for him to do so. Then, slowing down again, following an impulse that bubbles up behind his Adam’s apple and comes out as Shiro presses into Keith, tugs away from him, urges back in again, slower and deeper than ever, trying to give Keith everything and fill him up like he deserves. His heart flutters like it could give out at any moment, all because Keith groans for him so nicely, and Keith wipes away the sweat beading up on Shiro’s forehead, and Keith’s cheeks flush scarlet while he’s gasping and clenching around Shiro and edging his hips down like he can’t bear to let Shiro’s cock escape him.

Shiro’s lust growls out of his throat as he follows Keith lead and drives into him. Whatever Keith’s drawing out of him, it flares up into Shiro’s throat, uses his own voice to promise, _“You feel that, Baby? ‘Cause it’s all yours. All for you. Only ever for you. You, and this chubby belly you’ve put on, and your big, fat, beautiful ass. Nobody else. No matter what you weigh.”_

Keith keens, low and throaty, bucking his hips, and jostling his paunch, and taking Shiro’s cock in even deeper. His fingers twist up in Shiro’s hair and yank. He snickers, obviously pleased with himself and with the way that he makes gasp in pleasure-pain.

Tugging Shiro down into kissing distance, Keith mewls. “Even if I slim down?”

“Whatever makes you happy,” Shiro bites out, rocking into Keith and getting a moan that makes his chunky stomach tremble. All of his beautiful, stretch-marked pudge bobs against Shiro’s abs and hipbones, and he swivels his hips, angles himself so he can snake against Keith’s softness, his delectable, squishy chub. “Baby, please… Whatever you want.”

Swallowing thickly, Shiro keeps his breaths slow. Deep. He’s _so close_, but he can’t come yet. Not until Keith’s ready. When he tries to sneak a kiss, Keith turns his face away and Shiro sighs. He winces at a switchblade twist of pain that shocks through his chest—dammit, right, Hanahaki—but he keeps up his work. Keeps following where Keith leads, trying to get those sweet, whining gasps and moans out of Keith because he’s not sharing where he’s at, so Shiro relies on the cues of how Keith moves and the noises that Keith makes for him.

On the heels of a gasp, Keith drags Shiro down again. Staring him down, dead in the eye, Keith rubs a knot of tension at the top of Shiro’s spine. He smirks, and waits for Shiro to finish groaning before he says, “But what if I get _bigger_?”

“Jesus, yes,” bursts out of Shiro without him needing to think about it.

His hips rock into Keith, lazily and without asking for Shiro’s input. Throwing his head back, Keith moans so loudly, they can probably hear him on the street. At least there’s rapture in every note of it. At least he twitches his hips like, even with all that Shiro’s giving him, Keith’s hungry for more, more, _more_. At least he lets out an, _“Oh _**_God_**_, yes”_ when Shiro kneads at the thickest, softest part of his belly, digging his hips and abs into Keith’s middle while gripping hard onto his pudgy side.

“Wanna be _yours_, Sable—”

“I’m yours too, Baby. All yours—”

“Wanna make _you_ happy—”

“You _do_. God, you do—”

“You feel so _good_.” Keith squeezes Shiro’s ass like demanding that he find even more that he can give to Keith. So, Shiro thrusts again. Keith groans, hips bucking without obvious intent. And as that rush dies down for him, Keith bumps his warm, flushed forehead into Shiro’s sweaty one. “Make me bigger… _So _fat… I wanna feel you _more_… So good, so tight—”

“No, _you’re_ so tight—”

“So. _Tight_,” Keith says again, copping an even harder feel of Shiro’s backside. “So _hard_ on me… So _hot_…”

God, Shiro hopes he sounds like he’s gasping, more than squeaking. He probably doesn’t. But his next thrust gets such a desperate, hungry, keening noise out of Keith. Gets Keith to finally whimper that he’s close, _so close_, Sable, _Jesus fucking Christ_—

“As big as you want.” Shiro has to force the words out of himself. Has to force himself to hang on. Just a little bit longer. Just enough to make sure that Keith comes first. Tracing his fingers down the chubby bulges on Keith’s side, Shiro holds himself together. Manages to swear, “Love you so much… So beautiful. So plump. So _greedy_… If you _want_ to get bigger?”

Tugging on Keith’s cock, Shiro leans down, right up by Keith’s mouth. “We’ll make you the biggest fat-boy anybody’s ever seen.”

It’s hyperbole, sure, but Shiro seals that promise with a kiss.

Another thrust, one quick flick of his wrist, and Keith devolves into a mess of groaning. He shudders, wracked with the pleasure that comes out each time he gasps for breath and clawing up Shiro’s back. If he doesn’t draw blood, it’ll be a miracle. Then, with a tight, high-pitched whimper, Keith spills all over his stomach and Shiro’s hand.

Shiro comes not too long afterward. A couple quick thrusts, just to break through how much he’s made himself hold off. His orgasm hits him hard, and hot, and fast. A burst of white heat, and a groan that he half-muffles in the plush curve of Keith’s neck, and then? A sigh heaves its way out of Shiro, digging up from deep inside his bone marrow, and as soon as he’s out, he flops down beside Keith, struggling just to keep his breathing even.

“_Fuck_, Shiro,” Keith hisses, edging closer to him, bumping against Shiro’s abs until he gets Shiro to caress his belly, to brush his hand in gentle circles around Keith’s rolls of abundant, doughy chub. “No more holding out on me, okay? You were fucking _amazing_.”

Although Shiro nods and promises that he won’t hold back again—although he sighs in relief and wants so badly to believe that he didn’t screw up everything—he can’t quite silence the part of his mind that feels like Keith’s probably just being nice. As he nestles against Keith’s side, peppers kisses up and down Keith’s arm and shoulder, only one thought keeps Shiro from completely losing his head in those doubts. Namely: Keith would’ve told him to do better, if Shiro hadn’t been giving him the good time that he deserves.

Still, something about accepting Keith’s praise leaves Shiro feeling like maybe—just maybe—he didn’t really earn it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ………This was my first time writing bottom!Keith, and I’m not surprised by the fact that I needed kink to make it happen. Oops?


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, hey, Sendak is in this chapter.
> 
> He’s not a dick or an abuser in this AU.
> 
> Technically, he’s in PyeongChang and talking to Shiro over the phone, but still, he’s in this chapter.
> 
> Still not a dick or an abuser in this AU.
> 
> Maybe not the nicest guy to most people, but Shiro isn’t most people, which is also part of why Shiro has, “Maurice” privileges with them and why Sendak still cares about checking in on his ex.
> 
> ……I keep stating the thing about Sendak not being a dick or an abuser in this AU because, given how I usually write him, I’m still sometimes a little bit mind-boggled that I even have one (1) AU where his and Shiro’s relationship wasn’t some godawful abusive train-wreck.
> 
> Anyway, Sendak used to play for the New England Patriots and his only real ex-boyfriend [Shiro] knows absolutely nothing about hand-egg/American football, and I find this amusing.

Slipping back into normalcy on Monday morning… should feel weirder. Shiro’s skin should crawl as he takes in his morning run. He should feel sick while making breakfast and packing up Keith’s lunch. He should be squirming for more reasons than still not having an answer about what he wants to do for his birthday.

By the time Lotor shows up at the apartment with his binders of research and stack of printed out revision suggestions that he got from Zethrid, Dr. Rosenthal from USC, and Acxa’s sister (the only one of her siblings who still talks to her), Shiro would even take a sobbing meltdown over this big, looming sense that _something_ should be happening _but it isn’t_. He’d take another fit of Hanahaki hacking and spewing. Hell, he could probably go with the flow of his brain and his body decided to throw him into a panic attack and make him pass out.

Anything would be better than this big, empty, anticlimactic _nothing_.

“Mmm, technically, whatever you’re experiencing can be neither climactic nor anticlimactic, darling.” Humming pensively, Lotor sips his mug of green tea and waits for Shiro to indulge his compulsive need for drama asking what he means by that. “Aside from its use as an overly medical way of referring to _la petite mort_, the term ‘climax’ isn’t a natural one—”

“Yeah, and human beings invented all kinds of signifiers to refer to different objects, actions, and concepts, thereby tangling ourselves up in centuries upon endless centuries of communicational errors, and _failures_ to communicate, and linguistic garbage that probably no one understands for real, I…” Shiro trails off, wilting under the weight of Lotor arching an eyebrow like, _Have you quite finished this ridiculous diversion?_ “I’m just saying, Ballerina Barbie de Saussure: I paid attention to Dr. Currans’ lectures on post-structuralism, too.

“If you think that I mean to incite a debate about post-structuralism, then why are you invoking Ferdinand de…” Throwing up both hands in surrender, Lotor huffs. “Do not answer that, darling. I want to get back to my actual idea. I would also like to offer you some modicum of comfort, if you will allow us to move in such directions.”

Although Shiro nods, Lotor has to argue his cowlick back off his face before he can go on: “_Narrative_ climaxes, Kashi, are fundamentally unnatural. Humans made them up to try and impose some form of order on the universe in which we live. We organize our stories in certain ways, and building to a climax is one of the techniques we use. Therefore, you cannot truly have any anticlimactic experiences in your own life—not unless you attempt to impose on yourself a structure that does not naturally come to your misadventures. So…”

With a tired smile, he bats his foot at Shiro’s ankle. “What troubles plague your mind this time?”

There’s the fact that Shiro hasn’t coughed up any azaleas so far today. Hasn’t even gotten a chill deep in his chest like he _might_ start hacking. He went from zero to everything when this flare-up started, then found out that this was bad for him. Except he’s right back from everything to zero, and that’s concerning because, as far as Shiro knows, Hanahaki cannot magically get cured with two straight days of sex that played right into his and Keith’s favorite kink.

There’s the part of things where Shiro still doesn’t know what to do about his situations with Hunk and Lance. Sure, he needs to open up to them and share things with them that he’s kept buried for several reasons—but the fact that he has said reasons makes unburying these past experiences sound about as enjoyable as getting lobotomized with a rusty, tetanus-infested ice-pick. In all likelihood, Hunk would more or less understand, but at the moment, he might not want to give Shiro that kind of courtesy.

There’s the way that Keith hacked up five fully-bloomed black roses before he left for work today. There’s the way he handled it with the air of a man who’s gotten far too used to seeing a giant squid making love to an invisible pink elephant all over his living room. There’s the way he went from coughing up flowers to brushing his teeth to kissing Shiro as if nothing about this was even remotely odd.

Yet, when Shiro manages to find his voice, all he can think of to say is, “…Topping is really weird when you’re actually on top.”

Lotor furrows his brow. Makes a noise that’s halfway between a chuckle and a snort. At least it’s entirely affectionate.

In the face of that skepticism, Shiro shrugs. “I’d never actually been on top before, okay? Not before yesterday, with Keith.”

“Darling, _honestly_?” Lotor’s entire face scrunches up in disbelief. “I _know_ that you aren’t a _virgin_. And you have been inside me—”

“That doesn’t mean that I’ve been _on top_—”

“I would believe that with Maurice, considering that he doesn’t _enjoy_ bottoming as much—”

“Why would I lie to you about something like this, Barbie?”

“I’m not accusing you of _lying_ to me. I am simply…” Sighing, Lotor flips his cowlick off his face. He gives Shiro a long, pensive look, like he’s searching for something but has no concrete idea what it is. “Don’t you _like_ topping? Of course you enjoy _bottoming_, but—”

“Well, yeah, I like being the one to top, but?” Shiro pushes his laptop aside and slouches onto his elbows. Despite every impulse screaming at him meet Lotor’s gaze like adults who love and respect each other, he can’t make himself look up from the table. “I never really… Even when I was with Adam, then with you, and then Maurice? Sure, I wasn’t as big as I would get, but… It’s not like I really thought that I could—there’s just? When you aren’t small—or, like, when you let yourself get that big, I mean? Having a guy ride you is one thing, but hauling all that weight around—”

“Darling, _wait_.” Inhaling sharply, Lotor throws up a hand. Good thing, too, because he needs to shut his eyes while thinking and Shiro itches to chime in. But he keeps himself stifled until Lotor asks, “Are you telling me the truth, right now?”

“I don’t have any reason to lie to you, so yeah, I mean—”

“But how could you even… Kashi, why would you not… Are you _completely_ serious—”

“Serious as the pneumonia that no one will let me live down ‘cause I kept telling myself was just a cold—”

“Well, we _are _completely right in our concern over that stunning failure to care for yourself—”

“I’m not saying that you _aren’t_ in the right—”

“Perhaps not in _this_ conversation. However, you _have_ previously said that we—”

“At the moment, though? It’s more like I want you to let me—”

“Your attempts at distracting us from the true matter at hand aside? Whatever in the entire world could have possessed you—”

Groaning over top of Lotor, Shiro kneads a temple. “Okay, are _you_ being serious, now?”

This makes Lotor falter in the middle of a snarky retort that, no doubt, would’ve stunned Shiro into silence (at least, if Lotor had gotten his way). Realizing that he isn’t going to get out whatever words he had in mind, Lotor slouches onto his own elbows. He’s practically a mirror of Shiro, hunched over on the table, taking deep breaths that don’t seem to steady his nerves or give him much in the way of comfort. Twisting his fingers around in his cowlick doesn’t help him either, and the _Look_ that he shoots the tabletop has the air of someone who only had one request in mind—one that he probably deemed rudimentary levels of simple—and he’s had it systematically denied to him.

In lieu of getting whatever he thinks that he wants, Lotor sniffs and purses his lips. Once he’s composed himself enough to use his words, he needles Shiro with, “Darling, whatever you intend with bringing up your pneumonia and then dismissing its importance yet again? Your history gives me ample reason for concern. How many times must I prove to you that I take your well-being _very _seriously?”

“I didn’t say that. In this conversation or in any others. Nor would I.” Shiro quirks both eyebrows right back at Lotor, as if daring him to make good on the unspoken threat to cause some kind of nonsense—but the sad kitten face that he gets in return makes him swallow a sigh. “Look, whatever I did or said to make you feel like I was dismissing my health again? I’m sorry. Because I genuinely only wanted to use that as… Y’know, melodramatic hyperbole. The personal equivalent of, ‘Serious as a heart attack.’”

Lotor considers that for a moment before allowing himself to nod. “It is possible that I have something of a hair-trigger when it comes to protecting my friends and the goodness that they bring to my life,” he acquiesces, and Shiro can’t argue with that statement. Unspinning his cowlick, Lotor blinks at the wall. Gets that far-off look that tends to happen when he’s deep in thought, nearly to the point of losing himself in his own head. But before an interjection becomes necessary, he sighs. “Considering that we are discussing _you_, I likely have a shorter fuse than I would with others—”

“Yeah, well, I can’t blame you for that. And I’d be lying if I said that I couldn’t get like that over you, when the circumstances get—”

“So, we protect each other, then. This might be a better habit for us when we allow each other to finish a sentence—”

“Point taken. But at the same time? Given how hard it can be for either of us to talk so openly with anybody else—”

“I do not, however, apologize for my concern over the situation you initially described. I find that idea… More than a bit perplexing?”

With a huff, Lotor swishes out his ponytail. Something must be wrong with it, because he grabs up a hairbrush that Shiro left out on the table and takes out the elastic holding his hair in place. Tossing his head back, Lotor lets his long, luscious locks drape over the back of the chair. Softly clicking his tongue, he stares up at the ceiling and runs the brush through his hair. Again, he seems like he could easily space out entirely and forget that he’s supposed to be talking _with_ Shiro, rather than simply listening to him rabbit on about his problems.

But before Shiro needs to interject, Lotor explains, “Mind you, I did not have any issues with riding you, when we were still romantically together and I wanted my turn on to bottom. You made those encounters very worth my while, proved yourself a considerate, attentive lover—”

“I’m not fishing for that. Or anything like it.” Shiro’s cheeks flush warm. Even though Lotor isn’t looking at him, he ducks his chin as if he has something to hide and curling in on himself is the only way to conceal it. “I mean, yeah, I tried to give as good as you did? I wanted the sex to be _good_, and just because I was so big? That didn’t give me any good excuse _not_ to give you the best efforts. Or not to give you what you really, really wanted—”

“What I really, really wanted? Was to have sex with the boyfriend who loved me as often as both of us were comfortable doing so. The fact that I found you physically gorgeous and in every way perfectly my type? Was an additional bonus.” Dropping his hair, Lotor picks up his head enough to peer at Shiro’s face. “Did _you_ think that the only reason I took an interest in you was your size?”

There might be a lot to unpack in that question. Things might not be going so well for Lotor with Hunk.

Distracting him again will probably make Lotor even more nervous, though, so Shiro quirks his shoulders and shakes his head. “You were pretty upfront about the fact that you thought I was hot? Not like I gave you very many options, not with how I handled… Y’know, everything—”

“Yes, your willful obtuseness almost kept us from getting together at all. But you _did_ listen eventually—”

“Then, once I did? You were pretty open about the fact that you prefer to be with bigger guys. And okay, it felt a little weird, at first? Mostly because I didn’t really get… Like, I got that you were into _me_, as a _person_, and not only as a hot fat guy who you wanted to sleep with? But then it was like…” Failing to stop himself from sighing, Shiro winces through it. He barely holds off from rolling his eyes at himself and his own garbage antics. “Sure, there was the part of things where I took a while to understand that you weren’t totally full of it? When you said that you prefer to be with guys who have a little extra weight—”

“Or a_ considerable_ amount of extra weight, if I am _incredibly_ lucky.” Smirking like a kitten who got into the Really Good Cream, Lotor helps himself to a deep breath and his own sigh. Unlike Shiro’s, though, Lotor has a sigh of contentment—but he loses the easy smile almost immediately, falling into a tight, anxious look as he blinks at Shiro. “Not that I mean to imply that _you_—”

“I _did_ have a considerable amount of extra weight, though. Even when we first started dating? I got bigger than I was on our first date, sure. Hell, I’d _been_ bigger than that before.” And in retrospect, Shiro might have continued losing weight in college if he hadn’t been so _stupid_ as to start back on dieting like he’d done before. “But I wasn’t exactly _small_. And the fact that you were _into _how big I was, instead of acting like you had no idea that I was? Or sidestepping the issue as much as possible?”

Lotor furrows his brow and curls his lips into something that isn’t quite a frown. “You have always spoken so highly of the only boyfriend you had before me. So, if you don’t mind, darling: please explain what you mean?”

“I’m not saying anything _against_ Adam, okay?” As much as he wants to sigh, Shiro tries to content himself with tugging on his white fringe. “He was a great friend, a great boyfriend, and a great person overall. I loved him and I wouldn’t take back anything from our relationship. Not even with what his sister did to me because of it.”

Still, even with that disclaimer out of the way—even though Shiro believes every word of it—he shrugs and forces himself to swallow another sigh. Not getting the release grates his nerves like expensive cheese in an overpriced restaurant—but letting himself sigh will _hurt_ because Hanahaki flare-ups _suck_. Apparently, they suck more than people have already led Shiro to believe. He has to take it easy on his runs. He can’t sigh as often as he wants, unless he wants to deal with sharp, shooting pain that shocks and twists around his lungs and, given his luck, might well indicate that something worse is going on inside his body.

Worrying his fingers through his white fringe, Shiro goes on, “Look, the fact is? I _did_ feel like Adam found me attractive _despite_ my weight. Because it felt like he never wanted to admit that I was fat, y’know? Granted, a lot of that was on me—I mean, I felt the same way about Maurice way more often than he deserved, and if I’d actually gotten the message about Keith being in love with me this whole time? Then I definitely would’ve twisted anything that he ever told me about being beautiful? Into some kind of, ‘Sure, fine, Keith thinks that. He really believes it. But he thinks it _in spite_ of me being fat. He’d probably prefer it if I lost the weight already and gave him what he actually _deserves_.’”

Letting his hair flop over the back of the chair again, Lotor hums pensively. “Yes, darling, I am well acquainted with the extent to which you have internalized certain emotionally poisonous ideas about the relative value of your body, based on how much you weigh or—”

“But the thing is? I _liked_ that you were open about how much you like fat guys. Did I still have doubts? Of course I did. But with you?” Shiro tries to give Lotor a smile, but he probably falls short of making it believable. “Because you were so open with me about your kinks and your preferences? You made it easier for me to remember that those feelings were all on me—”

“I think that’s unfair. And an oversimplification of the complicated ways in which culture influences us—”

“Thank you for your input, Lotor Foucault. Can I please have Lotor Mireth Cizar back? Or are we gonna keep breaking out the post-structuralist circle-jerk?”

“I would prefer not to, if you truly wish to offer me an option—”

“Okay, good. Because I really don’t want to go get my _History of Sexuality_ or my _Discipline and Punish_ so we can pull out quotes while talking about… I don’t know?” Shaking his head, Shiro grumbles and musses up his bangs. “The complicated processes that led to both of us being a pair of freaks? Who got really lucky when we stumbled into the same degree program, because at least we complement each other. At least we understand each other, and we don’t have to pretend about certain… Sexual interests? With each other.”

“We have both gotten incredibly fortunate with the rest of our support networks as well—Sincline and my parents notwithstanding.” Sighing as though he’s staring headlong into the abyss once more and debating said abyss about who should get which pieces of their china in the divorce, Lotor pulls his hair up high, nearly to the top of his skull. “Of course, you would know this for yourself if you would allow yourself to be more open with our friends about the different things that turn you on.”

“Yeah, because I really want to hear them calling me a hypocrite. I already know that I _am_ one, so I don’t need to hear…” Shiro trails off, wilting under Lotor’s pointedly arched eyebrow and the feeling like he’s an ant beneath a magnifying glass. “You’ve never been fat, so it’s one thing for you to like fat guys, and weight gain, and feeder stuff. But I’ve _been_ really big before, so I should _not_ be into that, right? It’s different for us, don’t you think?”

“Not particularly?” When Shiro prods for more, Lotor clarifies, “I actively prefer men of ample size. The more softness that a man has on his body, the more attractive I will find him. True, I attempted to support your efforts at losing weight when you were still my boyfriend—because I did _not_ want to be like my brother—”

“You didn’t want to be a coke-addled professional come-stain who doesn’t appreciate a single good thing that he has?”

Lotor fixes Shiro with a dull, flat, singularly unimpressed expression. “I did not wish to force my preferences on someone I love when you were so vocally displeased with your body. I did not want to neglect your needs and desires, prioritizing whatever I wanted over your well-being and pretending that your desires did not exist unless they aligned with mine. I did not want to make you feel like you _needed_ to stay overweight or else I would leave you.”

“I never felt that with you, Barbie. Not once.” Shiro manages a genuine smile, albeit a small one. “I knew what you liked, but I promise: you never, _ever_ made me feel like you would ditch me if I lost the weight. Even if I didn't pull that off until after we broke things off romantically?”

“You are too kind sometimes, Takashi. If nothing else does you in before your time, then your insistent bleeding heart might well have the smoking gun.”

Regardless, once Lotor has his ponytail tied back again, he returns Shiro’s smile quite earnestly. Without any regard for the fact that Hunk or Keith could join them at any moment—with no apparent regard for the fact that Ryou also has a spare key to the apartment, so they are only alone for so long—Lotor allows himself to be open as he curls his hands into a heart. It’s a sweet moment. All the warmth radiates off of Lotor and good things flood into Shiro’s chest, letting him know how safe he is right here with his friend and creative partner. He doesn’t need to be anybody else, doesn’t need to be anything but exactly what he is, and Shiro’s taking that shot in the arm to heart—but then Lotor purses his lips and arches a perfectly manicured brow as if Shiro owes him something.

“You are also dragging us quite off-track,” he says. “You are diverting us from the question of why you so consistently had me ride you whenever I wanted to bottom? Because I was under the impression that you simply _preferred_ that position.”

“I mean, I _enjoyed_ it enough? Or else I wouldn’t have kept doing it with you—”

“I should surely hope that you wouldn’t have done something like that, you beautiful fool—”

“Then, it was a _great_ position for us to kiss each other in. And you know how I can be about kissing—”

“Indeed, I do. Because you are an _artist_ when it comes to making out. Having you suck the air out of my lungs while you had your cock inside of me?” Lotor makes a soft, high-pitched noise that sounds like he’s about to swoon. “Be still my gay, overstimulated little heart, darling. It was _fantastic_ when we did that with each other. I certainly hope that you intend to give Keith such attention, should he want—”

“If he ever wants that, then yeah, of course? Because I loved doing that, too. I want to do that with him _so much_, if he wants it. But still, though…” Shiro helps himself to a deep breath. Decides that no, to Hell with his Hanahaki flare-up and damn the pain. Winces his way through the pang of sighing. “You really want to know the biggest reason for all that? Why I asked you to ride me, the first time?”

Rolling his eyes, Lotor nods. “That would be why I pointed out that we had wandered off-course from our intended discussion—”

“I thought that I was too big to top you. Literally any other position, I thought that I could never…”

Letting out those words drags a sigh out of Shiro before he can stop himself. This one twists his lungs hard enough to make him whine. Pinching the bridge of his nose helps a bit. Gives him something else to focus on, at least. While he’s trying to get himself back together—trying to take deep breaths that get his nerves to stop fluttering around like they’re being wracked with electric shocks—Shiro shuts his eyes.

Huffing, Lotor edges down the table, moving toward Shiro. A hand lands on Shiro’s shoulder and gives him a firm, affectionate squeeze. When he looks up, Lotor’s hovering rather close to his face, giving Shiro a wide-eyed, heartfelt expression. He doesn’t manage a smile, but Shiro can’t blame him for that. Considering the subject at hand and the positions that Lotor has always held about such things, he’s likely putting a great deal of effort into keeping his face so soft, so free of judgment or condemnation.

He wouldn’t put in this kind of work for anybody. Shiro remains special to him, though—and that reassurance gives Shiro enough internal stability to nod. He’s ready to go on.

“Yesterday was the first time in my life that I’ve _literally_ topped a guy before, okay?” Shiro shrugs. Looking Lotor in the eye is making his stomach turn ever-so-slightly—but there’s more comfort to this than not. “I _liked_ it and all? But I never let myself do that before because I thought that I literally couldn’t. Like, you can’t go on some roller-coasters or carnival rides if you get too fat for them. I thought it was basically the same way, like… I’m not strong enough, I’m not flexible enough, I wouldn’t be able to make the experience _good_, what if I _crushed_ him—”

“Speaking for myself, darling?” Lotor smiles, a mix of fondness and a dangerous edge. “I _wanted _to feel all of your weight on top of me. Whenever Hunk is ready for sex—assuming that I ever get to such a point with him—then I will relish in feeling every single pound on top of me. And if you are completely honest with yourself… Looking at Keith and how much weight he has gained so far… Thinking about how much bigger he _could_ get—and likely _will_ get, if he continues in the same way that he has gone so far…”

Lotor’s eyes glimmer like sapphires—but also like the edge of a knife that’s keen on hacking its way through Shiro’s throat. “Would _you _be terribly opposed to having all of his weight on top of you? Pinning you to the bed… Overwhelming you with how big he’s gotten, with how _much_ of him there is and how _heavy_—”

“Yes, okay!_ Yes_! Are you happy now!”

Shiro blurts it out before he can stop himself. Before he realizes that the words are building on his tongue. Cheeks burning, he buries his face in his hands as though Lotor will finally see something in him that makes him decide that Shiro doesn’t deserve his loyalty or his friendship after all. As if after everything that they’ve been through together—as if after everything that they’ve seen each other through and everything they’ve helped each other to survive—as if after all of that, there’s any room to doubt that Lotor loves him.

Which, of course, there isn’t. So, Shiro shakes his head to banish those feelings and makes himself bite out, “I would absolutely _love_ for something like that to happen with Keith. I’d _love_ to get him on top of me like that, but—”

“Oh, but _nothing_, Takashi.” Lotor groans in (more or less) affectionate exasperation. “Unless you’ve already decided what to do for your birthday? Why don’t you ask Keith to top you into the flat surface of your choosing? Ask him to get on top of you properly and I am certain that he will oblige.”

On a deep inhale, Shiro leans back in his seat and lets his legs sprawl out where they fall. He barely puts in enough effort to avoid kicking Lotor or clattering into him. As he leans his head back and takes in a good, long look of the ceiling, Shiro can’t deny that Lotor has a point. He’s making everything about his solution sound far too simple—though, knowing him, he would want to dispute that point and he would likely point out that Shiro is very likely adding a few too many layers of unlikely complications—but regardless, Lotor has a point.

Namely: Shiro’s birthday will come next week. Since he’s home for this one, he and Keith have to squeeze in time to head off together, enough time to go do something special without anyone else. They did that for each other’s birthdays before they were each other’s boyfriends. They did it before either of them ever dated someone else, as much as they could manage when neither of them had his driver’s license. Special birthday gifts and outings are part of how they exist with each other—a part of their relationship that Shiro, for his part, doesn’t want to go without—and the onus falls on Shiro to figure out what he wants to do.

“Problem with all of this is?” Pulling out his phone, Shiro lets himself think aloud, since Lotor won’t judge him for anything he says. Not unless he proposes something stupid and needs someone to inform him before he gets himself in trouble. “I mean, there are so many different options out there… Sure, I want Keith to top me? But there are so many things I could ask for—”

“I highly doubt that Keith would _mind_ giving you an extra gift or outing in addition to fucking you, darling.” Lotor makes the roll of his eyes evident in how he drawls. Not that Shiro _means_ to dismiss him, or ignore him, or anything like that—but he really hopes that Lotor can’t see the way he’s frowning at his phone. “Considering how much you overcompensated for the two birthdays of his that you missed while we were at USC? He might feel that he hasn’t done enough for you in turn. Such insecurity could make him…”

Trailing off into a heated sigh, Lotor bats his foot at Shiro’s shin. “Are you listening to a single word that I have for you?”

“Yeah, I am, just…” Shiro lets Lotor see his scrunched up expression. “Why would my phone log me out of Instagram?”

Lotor makes a sound like _“I don’t know” _and jerks his shoulders. “Did you end a session and forget? Or let someone borrow your phone?”

Shaking his head, Shiro types his password in again and hands over his phone. Lotor needs to see what’s happening if he’s going to offer anything helpful—which he _could_ manage, probably. He knows his way around Instagram better than anyone else Shiro knows (excluding Lance, who might consider living on the app if he could do so). Trying to sign in leads to an error screen instead of going to the main page that Shiro recognizes.

After a few rounds of poking at it, Lotor concedes defeat. “I know that I’m a genius whom few can rival, darling,” he says, apologetically. “But you might need to pluck up your nerve and contact customer service.”

* * *

First thing on Tuesday morning, Shiro puts together an egg white omelette for himself and heaps leftover lasagna into the largest container that he can fit inside Keith’s lunchbox. Putting in the ice-pack, he adds two cans of Coke, a sizable ziploc bag of Oreos, another ziploc bag with some of the brownies that Keith still hasn’t eaten, and an apple. Sure, Keith can pack his own lunch—but spoiling him gives Shiro something to do with himself. Makes him feel useful. He isn’t gonna argue with getting an extra kiss before Keith leaves, either.

Second thing on Tuesday morning, Shiro checks his email. When he finds the one from Instagram’s customer service department, he sighs in relief but still needs to steel himself before he opens it up. According to Ms. Rebecca Ayers, Shiro’s gotten locked out of his account because someone reported him for allegedly posting someone else’s personal pictures as if they are his own. Her tone throughout the message is conciliatory but professional, assuring Shiro that, in the event of a misunderstanding, it’s really quite simple to clear this up. Instagram will simply require various forms of proof that Shiro is who he claims to be, uploaded according to a series of steps that she outlines in barely enough detail to be helpful.

Since neither Hunk nor Keith is around to object or stop him, Shiro shoves his laptop aside, folds his arms on the table, and bangs his forehead against his wrists. Thank God he decided to use today’s workout allotment on strength and resistance training. Running might clear his head better, but right now, Shiro doesn’t trust himself not to push harder and harder, going and going and going until he passes out or dies.

Third thing on Tuesday morning, Shiro heads to the gym and puts his mp3 player on shuffle. The first song it throws his way is George Michael’s “Faith,” which he hopes bodes well for the next ninety minutes. By the time he’s finished up, showered, and heading to his car, Shiro’s even starting to feel better. Sure, he needs to get all the evidence of his identity together so Instagram will release his account. Then, he needs to get back to work on his parts of his and Lotor’s latest grant proposal. But he has a plan of attack, which makes everything feel so much more manageable.

As he slips into the driver’s seat, though, Shiro feels his phone start buzzing. He’s tempted to let it go—except the ringtone starts blasting lyrics he hasn’t heard in way too long: _“You’ve loved all you can and now you’re all loved out—”_

Gasping, Shiro fumbles at his pocket. His pulse picks up. His phone keeps going, _“Ooh, ooh, baby, we’ve been a loooong, long way. And who’s to say where we’ll be tomorrow? Well, my heart says, ‘No’—”_

He gets his phone out. But it slips, falls, blasts Silver’s music at him: _“But my mind says it’s so. That we’ve got a love. Is it a love to stay—”_

Shiro winces at the sigh that he lets slip. Jesus, of course he dropped his phone into the basket attached to the door. At least he can maneuver more easily, now that he’s thinner. Not that it helps when he has to paw around through the trash that he and Keith seriously need to clean out of here. Not that it makes his phone’s insistent ringing sound any less like someone’s mocking him.

_“We got a wham! Bam! Shang-a-lang—”_

“_Maurice!_” Shiro nearly chokes on getting out his name. Slumping into the seat, he allows himself to smile. “God, it’s so good to hear your voice.”

“Yours as well, sweet boy. You let me go for so long, I almost thought that I might miss you.” Maurice’s chuckle at Shiro’s explanation for himself sounds indulgent and warm. Sweet. As fond as ever, because inexplicably, he’s kept such a powerful shine for Shiro. “I can hardly blame you for being startled. Had you been the one to call me, I might have dropped my phone, too.”

“Well, I still feel pretty silly for it. Especially since… Oh my God, isn’t it like two AM in South Korea?”

Maurice hums like he’s deep in thought and probably shaking his head. “Only half-an-hour past midnight, actually. Still rather late, considering how eventful things have been. Simply attending as the uncle of an Olympian can put one through the wringer.”

“Yeah, Jesus, I bet you’re exhausted, right?”

“Mmm, I have been more so. I have also been less so. But I _am_ quite relieved that we have nowhere that we _need_ to be tomorrow.” He pauses for long enough that Shiro almost asks why he’s calling, not least since it cannot be cheap to ring up Massachusetts when you’re in PyeongChang. But before he can get the question fully formed, Maurice tells him, “I wanted to check in on you, sweet boy. How are you doing?”

“What, _me_?” Shiro splutters, feeling thicker than a twelve-pound brick and like his mouth’s been shot up full of Novocaine. Combing his fingers through his white fringe, he curls one leg up onto the seat with him. “I mean, I just got done at the gym? Had a good session? And I dunno, I told you about me and Keith, right?”

“Yes, your last email mentioned that. _Mazel tov_ to both of you—Keith more so, though. I do hope he appreciates how lucky he is.”

“I’m the luckier one, but… I mean, for what it’s worth? He’d agree with you on that.”

“Good. Should Keith ever need a refresher course on how best to appreciate you, I will not hesitate to give him such an education.” Which comes off like Maurice is genuinely smiling. Which, in turn, would sound far more reassuring if Maurice wouldn’t sigh like he’s unloading an inhumanly heavy load. “But that message is also why I felt such a need to call you. Everything you said, it all seemed so…”

He lets slip one of his growly, overly pensive noises. “Even through the written word, I could _feel_ you plastering on a fake smile, Kashi.”

Shiro shouldn’t sigh. Not when Maurice is trying to look out for him and especially not given the Hanahaki flare-up of everything.

But even though he knows better, the pressure in his chest boils over. A sigh drags itself up and bursts out of him before he can put in the effort to control himself. Biting down on his lip, he keeps himself from wincing too much. Except it doesn’t stop a chill from socking him in the chest. He bites back on a shiver. Then, on a shudder. Something scratches at the back of his throat as if he’s coming down with strep, like it’s tickling him with a set of five-inch talons. Swallowing thickly doesn’t help him feel better. Doesn’t calm down the feeling like he’s going to hack up both his lungs and probably his small intestine.

Except the coughing doesn’t start. Staring out the window at a brick wall, Shiro makes himself keep breathing deeply. Tries to ignore the sharp feeling like he has thorns writhing around inside his chest. He holds his breath, hopes that it’ll make his lungs protest and kick him down with coughing. But that doesn’t happen, and Shiro waits long enough that Maurice starts calling at him, _“Kashi? …Kashi? …Kashi—”_

“Sorry, I’m here, I was just… I wasn’t trying to ignore you or… I’m not saying, like…”

Wilting further into the seat makes Shiro’s knee nudge against the steering wheel. This makes his stomach twist itself up in tight knots that probably won’t let him untie them. Before he left for USC, he’d bulged and overflowed with so much swollen, excess flab that the wheel had sunk into his belly. No, rubbing his leg against the wheel like this isn’t the same thing. Yes, the barely-there pain keeps Shiro grounded in the moment. No, he isn’t fat anymore and yes, he worked to lose weight like he wanted. He’s done right by his body, he’s done right by himself, and he’s put hard work into maintaining the results.

But Shiro needs to tug on his white fringe before he can steady his nerves and his breathing. He needs to hear Maurice call his name again before he can remember what it takes to mentally summon up the words he wants, much less what it takes to say them.

As if anticipating this, Maurice sighs softly. “Have I put you on the spot with that question, sweet boy?”

“Little bit, yeah?” Shiro laughs breathlessly and knocks his head back against the seat. Blinking at the ceiling doesn’t give him any answers, but at least Maurice’s voice is gentle as he asks what Shiro means. “Aside from Lotor, my brother, and Keith? People have been asking me that even less often than usual, lately. Which is honestly pretty hypocritical of them? Sure, guys. Go off at me about how losing weight won’t solve my problems, but then you keep acting like it totally has? Because I guess I don’t get to have both abs _and_ problems?”

Another sigh out of Maurice, and God, Shiro burns with how much he wants to join his ex in getting that kind of emotional release. Considering how much it’ll hurt, though—and especially in light of that chill and how it didn’t lead to any coughing—Shiro holds himself back. He’s already dug himself into a pretty considerable hole with his Hanahaki. If he knowingly, willfully exacerbates things, then Shiro will get himself into trouble with Keith. With Lotor. With Ryou. With as many of their friends who can still put up with him, or who can pretend to do that as their numbers increasingly dwindle—

“I don’t… I don’t know what to tell you?”

“Aim for the truth, sweet boy. Whatever you need to say, I will listen without judgment. You have my word.”

From most other people, that promise wouldn’t be worth much. Hearing those words now, though, Shiro feels warmth rushing through his chest, drowning out the lingering hints of chill with a feeling like everything might actually turn out alright. Most people only ever run their mouths, telling you whatever they think you want to hear as long as they can benefit from it—but Maurice doesn’t give his word to just anybody. Moreover, he doesn’t make pacts or vows to anyone without the full intent to make good on whatever he swears to see done. Even such low-key examples of this become matters of personal honor and commitment to him, and he takes all of them seriously.

Maybe this would be easier if Maurice were here. Something about his physical presence always used to be relaxing. Between his height and his impossibly broad shoulders, with his wide chest and his firm muscles cloaked in unmistakable softness, he never made Shiro feel like such a freak for his size. Being fat still left Shiro feeling uncomfortable in his own skin, but Maurice could make him feel less irreparable. It definitely didn’t hurt that Maurice could actually get his arms all the way around Shiro, something that most people couldn’t even get close to doing, back then.

Having him here now might help Shiro feel like his emotions have any shape to them that he can effectively communicate. Aside from the guilt that’s twisting around his lungs over how much this call must be costing Maurice, but that’s not what he asked about.

“I guess I feel… Not bad? At least, not overall? Not most of the time?” Shiro isn’t sure how much he believes what he’s saying. Yes, it’s an accurate summary of his emotions, but he isn’t sure how much he believes what he’s feeling. Either way, the brick wall doesn’t judge him for his uncertainty, so he keeps staring at it instead of letting himself check his reflection in the rear-view mirror. “But then there are all the times when I do feel bad, and I don’t always know why? Because I _shouldn’t _feel bad when there isn’t any reason for it, and usually…”

Resisting the impulse to sigh would be better for Shiro. Except he doesn’t bother trying. The pain shocks through him like he’s stuck a wet fork into a power outlet—but God, releasing all the pent-up tension makes his chest feel ever so slightly less encumbered.

“I don’t know, though? It’s still like there’s something that isn’t exactly…”

“You _do_ know,” Maurice cuts into Shiro’s silence. Maybe he only needed to get his thoughts together—but Maurice’s voice comes to him so solid. So stable. So reassuring, because he _believes_ in Shiro so much. Believes in everything he’s saying. “The fact that you are having trouble putting words on what you know? Does not mean that you don’t know it. You are doing exceptionally well, sweet boy. Keep going, when you’re ready to do so.”

If only Shiro could be ready simply because Maurice believed that he could be.

Still, after a moment, he manages to get his voice together. Manages to make himself say, “It’s almost like getting into another depressive downswing, y’know? Nothing’s wrong, except for everything. Everything’s fine, except for all the reasons why it isn’t. That’s a perfect explanation, too—except for how it doesn’t work, this time. Because I’m not having any of that trouble sleeping, or any of the issues that usually go hand-in-hand with any down periods for me…”

Cringing through another sigh, Shiro yanks hard on his white fringe. “The issues that _are_ cropping up don’t feel like they’re depressive, though? Like, my appetite’s been really hit or miss, but it’s not like, ‘Deciding what to eat sounds like too much work.’ It’s more, ‘I feel like I know what I want, I _know_ that I want to work on certain habits that I’m worried about—but then, no matter what I do for myself, everything tastes _awful_.’ Then, other things feel like, ‘Oh, okay. Lance is picking on me for losing weight again, so I’m losing control of my temper because I’m sick of it and I want him to stop already.’”

“You did mention that Lance has been even more himself than usual. Has it gotten worse?” A quick click of the tongue, and then Maurice adds, “Or did you downplay how much you dislike the current state of affairs between you and your friend?”

“A little of both? He hasn’t told me that I’m _hashtag Not His Shiro_ in a little bit—or posted it on his Instagram, or anything like that? But it’s still feeling, like…” Shaking his head gives Shiro something to do with himself. Takes some of the edge off of the fact that sighing will only make him feel worse. Not enough for Shiro to feel _better_—but enough to get him through saying, “It’s still hard for me to get past it when I don’t feel like he’s actually _sorry_?”

“Mmm, he might not be. Having an incomplete frame of reference could throw off his ability to appreciate what his actions—”

“Yeah, that’s what Laura said about him and Hunk. And I get that they have an incomplete frame of reference, but at the same time…”

“You don’t feel that you owe Lance or Hunk any explanations?”

“That’s putting a pretty fine point on it, but…”

“But am I _wrong_?”

“No? Not exactly?” Shiro lets himself have another sigh. At this point, the pain’s keeping him grounded, more than anything else. Who knows? Maybe sighing will make him start coughing again. He’s supposed to be doing that, so maybe his lungs need some prompting.

Not entirely unlike how Maurice needs to prod him before Shiro can explain, “You’re not _wrong_ because I don’t _want_ to owe them any explanations? But I also don’t know if I owe them that or not? Because sure, I did what I did in California, and I did it for _my own_ health and happiness? But it’s like that old saying about how no one is an island, right?”

“Even if any people could thrive in complete isolation like that? You would not be one of them, sweet boy.” Maurice sighs himself, and he sounds as exhausted as Shiro feels. Even though he wouldn’t have gotten involved in any of this if not for Shiro, he’s taking it so seriously… His voice practically aches with gravitas as he tells Shiro, “_‘I have no need of friendship, friendship causes pain. It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain’_—”

“_‘If I never loved, I never would have cried,’_” Shiro answers, recognizing this old favorite song of Maurice’s (and Obaasan’s, though Shiro never told Maurice so). “Good thing Simon and Garfunkel wrote that as a satire. Otherwise, I might get upset about them making it sound so easy to pull back from people.”

“Such a process would prove harder for you than for most people—”

“Because I’m emotionally sensitive and needy, and I don’t know how to exist on my own—”

“Because you _are_ so sensitive, as you said. and in spite of everything that you have endured, you still want to be around people.” While Maurice’s tone isn’t sharp or harsh, he sounds like he’s too tired for this and soldiering through it anyway. The cost of the call might not faze him, not with how much money he makes—but Shiro needs to hold his tongue for the sake of Maurice’s general well-being. “I still admire your compassion, sweet boy. And I respect how much work you put into pursuing the human contact that you love so much, even though you fear what might happen…”

_I can hear you building up to the, “But,” Maurice_, Shiro keeps to himself because it wouldn’t help. Acting like a snarky little brat doesn’t help on a _good_ day, much less when Maurice is taking out time like this and calling Shiro from PyeongChang, just because he’s concerned.

“What worries me,” Maurice says, “is how much credence you give to the opinions of other people. Regardless of whether or not they deserve that, you care so much about what they think of you. About the persona that you project to them—”

“After what I went through before I met you, while we were together, and after we broke up? Can you really blame me for worrying about that? With everything that other people have put me through, can you actually say that it’s _weakness_ for me to—”

“Absolutely not. Nor do I blame you for how much you care about others’ opinions—”

“And it’s not like I’m having my usual old problems, exactly? I mean, I _do_ still freak out when people stare at me for too long. And I wonder what they’re whispering, because I assume that it’s judgmental and negative, and I want to call them out—”

“Yet, you _are_ still giving an undue amount of consideration to what other people think of you and your choices.”

“Mostly because we’re talking about my _friends_, this time? And I feel like I must have done _something_ to make such a mess of things between us—but all I can think of that I did? Was lose weight without telling them.” Shutting his eyes and tipping his head back against the seat, Shiro huffs. “Which… Maybe that’s more their business than I thought it was? I thought that I was only changing _my_ habits and _my_ body, so why should it be any of _their_ calls…”

“You were quite right about that, if my opinion on the matter carries any significance—”

“Of course your opinion means something to me, Maurice. You actually have _any _idea what it’s like—”

“I am, however, subject to an admitted bias.” Maurice makes a sound like the vocal equivalent of a shrug. “In addition to only hearing your perspective on what has gone on lately, I am more inclined to take your side in any matters that might crop up between you and your friends. Not that I find any of them as distasteful as I might have done before, but…”

Another throaty, noncommittal sound, and then his voice goes warm and soft to tell Shiro, “Overall, my concern for your friends begins and ends with the fact that they matter so much to you, sweet boy. Ultimately, I care more for _you, yourself_ than I ever will for any of them—and I take the question of your personal and bodily agency very seriously.”

There might be a few exceptions to that rule. Maurice probably has more capacity to care about Lotor and Ryou, since he’s actually met both of them and Ryou is Shiro’s brother. Even if Maurice only ever deals with Lotor and Ryou because of Shiro, knowing them better than the other people in Shiro’s life means that he _might_ have more regard for them as people in their own right.

He might care about Keith, because he and Shiro are each other’s boyfriends now, even though letting him and Maurice meet each other could go sideways very quickly. Unfortunately, Keith cares about Maurice and, on some level, he still wants Maurice to have been a villain—even though Keith has more in common with Maurice than either of them realizes. Passion that burns and commitment to the things that they believe in, driven and resilient and loyal… They prefer doing the hard work of a task to receiving that much glory for it, and yet, both of them wound up in jobs that attracted a great deal of attention… They can seem quick to anger, but it’s only because most people don’t understand how much effort they put into controlling themselves at any given time… Honestly, if not for the inexplicable chip on Keith’s shoulder, he and Maurice could get on like a house on fire and probably learn a lot from each other.

Since they’ll never cross each other’s paths, though, it’s not that big a deal that Keith dislikes Maurice unfairly.

It’s much easier, and much nicer, for Shiro to let relief wash over him. Feeling such a flood of warmth—feeling so much more capable of handling everything that the day has left for him—all over hearing that he still matters to his ex? That’s weird as Hell, Shiro’s pretty certain, and something nagging at the back of Shiro’s skull screams at him that he’s probably a terrible boyfriend to Keith for taking any kind of comfort from Maurice.

But Shiro’s lips almost curl into a smile as he admits, “Right now, I’m more with you than not. Even I’m not feeling like I want to deal with a lot of what my friends have to say about most things. If it’s not Ezor and Nyma and Matt objectifying me, then it’s someone being mad at me for wanting to get healthy on my own terms. For wanting to do something that made _me_ happy.”

Maurice hums as if he’s nodding. As if he’d give Shiro one of his small, knowing smiles and brush his hair back off his face, were he physically able to do so, right now. “Such a significant, sudden-seeming change could still have shocked them. It could have left them feeling rather adrift, or like you shut them out first, no matter what reasons you had. All of which I understand, considering that your previous patterns exacerbated how poorly you felt—”

“So do I. Maybe I didn’t get where they were coming from, at first. I didn’t even think it’d be a big deal for me to come home thinner, but…” Rolling his eyes at his own past-self’s oversight, Shiro huffs. “I also thought, ‘Oh, I’m skinny now and I’ve got abs. That means nobody will ever stare at me in public again, especially since nobody’s hit on me since I was still kinda chubby’—”

“As much as I care for you? I very much doubt that no one tried to proposition you as you lost weight.”

“There was a creep at my gym in LA who wanted to be my feeder and didn’t really understand consent. At least, not that I could tell.” Shiro could also mention the casual hook-ups, but those stopped as he lost weight. “There was another creep at the studio Lotor and I interned at? He wasn’t into anything kinky, though. He was the sort of creep who didn’t think that I counted as a real person until I slimmed down.” Shaking his head, he adds, “If not for the office’s strict rules about sexual harassment? He would’ve gone in way harder on telling me stuff like, ‘You’ve really got such a pretty face. It’s a shame that you’re a huge, fat _blob_.’”

“Had he said that to your face? I would have seen to making it the last time he could insult anyone in such a manner.”

“Either way, aside from Keith and a guy at my gym back here? Guys have pretty much stopped hitting on me.”

Maurice gives him a noncommittal hum.

Desperately wanting to get back to an easier discussion, Shiro bottles up a sigh and says, “Anyway, I thought the lack of propositions meant that I was exempt from anybody gawking at me in public anymore? So, when I was coming home, it was like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna wear a crop-top on mine and Lotor’s flight home, so Keith can see my abs when he and Lance come meet us. Clearly, no one else is going to bother looking at me twice’—”

“Oh, sweet boy… Did you _honestly_—”

“Yeah. Which went other than how I expected. Like, the exact opposite of what I expected.” Maurice’s spluttering, half-muffled struggle not to laugh coaxes a snicker out of Shiro. “The logic on my part was completely non-existent, y’know? I mean, a six-foot-four, broad-shouldered, Japanese-American guy with washboard abs slouching through Logan International, wearing a crop-top in the middle of freaking _January_? And thinking that people only rubberneck at you if you’re fat or something? Come on, I should’ve known better, right?”

Shrugging and letting himself smirk, Shiro tacks on, “Anyway, that’s how I learned a valuable lesson about crop-tops. And about how my own perception of what is or isn’t a big deal might not be entirely accurate.”

“Oh, good Lord—” Maurice gives up on holding back, but Shiro doesn’t mind.

Maurice’s laugh cracks his voice like a baseball crashing into a window. When it rockets out of him, it sounds dusty from disuse. But there’s still something so warm, and fond, and soft about it… Even having this laugh at Shiro’s expense can’t make Maurice sound less reassuring.

Unfortunately, Maurice’s laugh doesn’t fix all of the problems still bubbling up inside of Shiro. By the time his ex calms down enough for him to get a word in edgewise, Shiro’s back has gone tense from holding in the things that he wanted to say. The silence is his cue to voice all the things he had in mind while Maurice enjoyed that anecdote about his sweet boy’s rather egregious lack of good judgment.

But Shiro stays quiet for long enough that Maurice gives him another warm sigh. “Are you alright? I did not wish to hurt you by laughing like that. But you presented that situation as a joke, and that _does_ sound like one of the questionable ideas that you sometimes have—”

“No, no, I’m fine about the laughing. Please, laughing about it makes the whole thing feel less outrageously bad.” Still, though, Shiro needs a few deep breaths and a reminder that he can speak freely before he can get himself through explaining, “I’m just feeling like… Okay, from their perspective? I changed all of a sudden, completely out of nowhere, and enough that it’s almost like I’m a different person. They didn’t get to see it in progress, or experience it gradually, or acclimate to any of this. But it’s still like—”

“You value them and as such, you still crave their support. You feel like they have extended you no understanding while expecting you to see their perspectives perfectly. You feel abandoned, at least emotionally—” In response to Shiro’s befuddled spluttering, Maurice asks him to breathe deeply and just listen. “Sweet boy. Kashi. You are not weak for needing and wanting as much support and positive affirmation as you do. But do you help anyone by denying that you want such things?”

“…No,” Shiro acquiesces with barely any thought. With all the evidence he’s built up over his entire life, he doesn’t need to think about his answer. “That’s what kills me about what’s been going on with Hunk. Because he’s a big guy too. And he doesn’t have an easy time of ignoring people like Ryou, so I thought that, out of _everyone_ in The Gang, Hunk would be the one to _understand_ why I wanted to lose weight so badly. I thought he’d get why I did what I did.”

As he rubs an eye, Shiro can’t help letting slip a throaty, discontented sound. “Except Hunk’s been mad at me since I got back. So, I gave him space because I thought that’s what he needed? But he hasn’t done anything to start a conversation, and I don’t know _where_ to start one. Because I get that I upset him. I get that I have some explaining to do with him, and I get that I need to apologize for _something_, but Hunk isn’t talking to me about this? At least he _is_ talking to me, instead of pretending I don’t exist? But the air between us is always tense, these days, like we can’t just have a conversation without it being…”

Shiro doesn’t try to resist his impulses; he lets himself sigh. The pain goes off like fireworks, but it’s getting duller. Easier to tune out. Shoving aside thoughts of what this might mean for his Hanahaki, Shiro murmurs, “And the worst part is? I still don’t know what I did so _wrong_.”

“You have done nothing wrong, sweet boy. At least, not that I can tell.” There’s an odd sound, as if Maurice tried to muffle a yawn and only half-succeeded. “Yes, you made choices that some of the people in your life do not like or appreciate. But as they primarily affected you and your own well-being, it was your right to do as you pleased. Anyone who would try to take such a choice away from you? Would be the one in the wrong.”

Another weird noise—but right at the end, he’s definitely yawning. “However, your desire for their support does not mean that your friends are obligated to censor their reactions to how you have changed, or to pretend that they do not have problems with your actions—”

“I _know_. But that doesn’t help when I _want_ to make things right and I don’t know which of my screw-ups Hunk’s taking issue with—”

“Have you tried asking him?”

The question is so simple. The tacit solution seems so straightforward.

Except all Shiro comes up with in response is silence, and so Maurice goes on, “He and Lance lack the proper frame of reference with which to appreciate _your_ position on this matter. So, could it not also be possible that you lack the right frame of reference to understand _their_ behaviors and reactions? In which case, you would be best served by _asking _Hunk what bothers him.”

All of which is good advice. True, it makes everything sound too simple. It paints an unfair picture of the situation, arguing that this dispute will ever be resolved that easily, and this is a fatal flaw—but the underlying ideas are solid. Shiro realizes this, no matter how much space he’s wanted to give Hunk to freely be mad at him for whatever he did wrong, whatever he screwed up, and whatever he deserves Hunk’s irritation over.

Still, Shiro would die to cut out any talking and get a hug from Maurice instead.

* * *

Come Wednesday, Shiro doesn’t have the situation fixed with his Instagram account.

Which _really_ stings after he and Lotor hit the gym before lunch, because on the other side of some five-hundred push-ups, four-hundred-fifty sit-ups, and half an hour on the rowing machine? Shiro actually_ likes _how he looks in his post-workout, pre-shower selfie.

His tight black top used to be a t-shirt, before Lotor got annoyed with him and cut the sleeves off. That ruined Shiro’s ability to wear this shirt out to most vaguely respectable places, but he can take this to the gym and God, but it shows off his arms. True, Shiro doesn’t really have bad arm days anymore. No matter how he feels about them or doesn’t, he’s worked hard to get the body that he’s wanted and the effort shows. If he genuinely doesn’t feel like he can lift himself up emotionally, Keith’s been happy to nuzzle at Shiro’s arms, or drape an arm around his waspish waist and kiss all up and down his biceps to keep Shiro from going on a run.

Today, though? Shiro’s arms look _great_. Tanned, toned, glistening with enough sweat to look rugged but not enough to look disgusting, and jacked with muscles but not so much that it looks unnatural—at least, Shiro doesn’t _feel_ like his arms look unnatural. He sure _hopes_ that he doesn’t look like he sold his soul or relied on anabolic steroids to get these guns.

The rest of him comes out looking pretty good, too. His smile doesn’t look forced for once, which might be a minor miracle. On his chest, he has a white drawing of a hand, fingers splayed in the wide _‘V’ _of the Vulcan salute. Underneath that, white letters spell out, _“Live Long And Prosper”_—and while neither part of the design is so stretched as to be unrecognizable, Shiro’s chest fills out the fabric nicely. Around his midsection, the fabric could fit Shiro’s abs more snugly, but still, the hints come through clearly. Without insisting upon themselves enough to get obnoxious, Shiro’s abs make their presence known and tease the viewer with the fact that they exist.

All up, Shiro looks _good_. He looks _hot_. Nobody could take this away from him either, because he _feels_ hot—except he remains locked out of his Instagram account and entirely unable to share this selfie on his social media of choice. Lotor has a point that Shiro could post it on Facebook instead, but that sounds about as agreeable to him as coprophagia.

“Which is to say that it doesn’t sound very agreeable to me at _all_, Barbie.”

“No. Really, darling. You don’t say. Clearly, I missed the clever subtext about your displeasure with this idea—”

“Do you really want me to unwittingly sell my selfies to Cambridge Analytica or whoever Facebook’s selling our data to this time? Because Zuckerberg can say whatever the Hell he wants about how he isn’t doing that anymore, but I don’t—”

“Do you even _listen_ to yourself when you get like this, Takashi? You are starting to sound like _Slav_.”

Shiro grimaces, grateful that they’re held up at a stop-walk. He needs to look Lotor in the eye while telling him, “You take that back.”

“Mmm, no. Shan’t.” Shrugging, Lotor huffs and shakes his cowlick off his face. “When you decide to stop babbling conspiracy theory nonsense like your cousin’s boyfriend? Then I will retract that statement. Until such time though, darling, I refuse to apply salve to your ego when you are, indeed, giving me a very convincing impersonation of—”

“Except Slav’s garbage about alternate realities should go back to science-fiction, where it _belongs_—”

“And you are rabbiting on about genuine problems that Facebook has had, relying on outdated information about said scandals, and using this line of reasoning to justify something that you would have done regardless of the explanation.” Pursing his lips, Lotor hooks his arm up with Shiro’s. “Tell me that I’m wrong, darling. Show your work. MLA or Chicago style citations, _s’il te plaît_.”

Shiro shakes his head and rolls his eyes at the knowing way Lotor arches both his eyebrows. Walking a few blocks to Sal’s shouldn’t involve this much mutual exasperation. It shouldn’t involve them needing to physically cling at each other. Except Lotor’s still pretty worked up from his cathartic, anger management workout session, and Shiro’s got frustration building up inside him. He’s bubbling and burning like somebody dropped a whole bag of pop-rocks into a two-liter bottle of Coke, then let a bunch of drunk, stupid, hypermasculine frat-jocks throw it around and spike it like an American football.

Man, if he’d known that he was gonna be in a Mood like this? Shiro never would’ve agreed to meet Lance and Ryou for lunch today.

“Outdated information or not,” he sighs more than he should and winces for this oversight. “I’m not in the wrong for being leery of Facebook.”

“If I truly believed that you _cared_ about such things in more than a detached, intellectual fashion? Then I might acquiesce to the merits of your concerns.” Humming pensively, Lotor huddles closer to him—as much as he can manage while they’re walking, anyway. For the life of him, Shiro can’t tell if this is a protective gesture, contact for the sake of making Shiro feel better, or Lotor trying to borrow some of his body heat. “Additionally, if I did not _know_ that you simply don’t want to offer certain chances to some of the people with whom you attended high school—”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about. Or not as much of an idea as you _think_ you have—”

“When the subject at hand is your ten-ton backlog of emotional problems, darling—”

“Well, if I _did_ want to keep people from my high school away from this photo? Then why wouldn’t I just not put it online.”

“Fair point, I suppose. Except for the fact that you like getting the positive affirmation on your selfies.”

Shiro can’t deny that, so he doesn’t bother trying. He just shakes his head and swallows the sigh that wants to come out. Leaning toward Lotor, he says, “If I could text the shot to Keith, then maybe that’d take the edge off for me? But he’s picking up extra shifts so Nyma can have more time for rehearsals and I mean? He asked me not to text him while he’s working.” With a huff and a shake of the head, Shiro drags Lotor around the corner. “Apparently, I’m too distracting and he doesn’t know how to handle it.”

“I don’t blame your beloved for putting such a restriction on you, darling.” Lotor sniffs, rubbing his and Shiro’s biceps together. “Even _before_ you got the hateful abdominal muscles that you have always wanted? You had a terrible knack for diverting one’s attention away from any particular tasks and onto yourself. If I recall correctly, that was one of the reasons why Maurice preferred you avoiding his games, yes?”

“Yeah, true.” Snorting, Shiro shakes his head and can’t help grinning. “I mean, there were other, more important things. Y’know, like how he didn’t want us to get outed? And the fact that I don’t really care for football? But he _did_ also cite how easily I distract him from… pretty much everything else he cares about.”

“There it is.” With a fond snicker, Lotor reaches up to poke Shiro’s cheek. “There’s the smile that I like to see.”

If Lotor were almost anyone else, he’d never be allowed to get away with invading Shiro’s personal space like this. He _definitely _couldn’t get away with essentially telling Shiro that he needs to smile more. But because he’s Lotor—and more specifically, because he’s one of the best friends that Shiro’s ever had and one of the precious few people in his life who has always made Shiro feel _safe_—these gestures only make Shiro grin more broadly and more intensely.

When they finally reach the diner, Lance and Ryou are waiting for them in a booth. They move to let Shiro and Lotor sit by the window, but less because they want to give up the good seats. It’s more because they’ll need to leave before Shiro and Lotor. After all, Ryou has evening classes back on campus—as in, the classes that he’s taking, rather than the ones he needs to teach—and Nyma called Lance early for tonight’s _Cabaret_ rehearsal.

“Which I totally understand and don’t have any kinda problem with—”

“I should hope not,” Lotor drawls, perching his chin on his palm and scooting closer to the wall. Whether it’s for his own comfort or for Lance’s, it gives Lance more room to gesticulate and Lotor gets more space to claim as His, His Own, And Distinctly Not Yours. “After all, you are playing co-star to Ezor’s Sally Bowles. The Emcee is not a minor role to begin with—”

“Uh, _yeah_, Prince Loser? I _know that_. Literally what other role would fit me, though—”

“Hmmm, if I were the director? I would try you out as Cliff Bradshaw, just to see how you did.” As Lance groans and pouts at him, Lotor rolls his eyes. Nevertheless, he relents: “But yes. Ultimately, I would likely agree with Nyma and cast you as the Master of Ceremonies. Especially if I were working with a choreographer who wished to make full use of how flexible you are.”

“Yeah, well.” Beaming like a mega-watt bulb, Lance feigns an _awww, shucks_ shrug. “If Luxia weren’t making full use of my range of motion? Then at least I’ve got a king and princess back home who’d do right by me. ’Cause you _know_ they love how flexible I am.”

Lance winks at Ryou, who gives him an appreciative chuckle. Then, something kicks at Shiro’s ankle.

Furrowing his brow, Shiro can’t pick out any differences in Lotor’s face or posture… He wouldn’t kick Shiro without making sure that Shiro _knew_ who kicked him, so it was probably Lance’s foot. But he’s still grinning and the impact was too gentle for something meant to injure. So, it was most likely an accident. In all likelihood, Lance splayed his legs out and didn’t pay attention to where they were going, or maybe he was trying to play footsie with Ryou and missed. Either way, Shiro doesn’t need to cause any kind of fuss about this because it isn’t actually a big deal.

Lance didn’t _mean_ to do anything untoward, so Shiro can do what Acxa’s always telling Lotor to do: pull a _Frozen_ and let it go.

That’s easy enough while they’re waiting for Shay to come around and take their orders. When she does swing by, though, she sets an enormous “Chunky Monkey” milkshake in between Lance and Ryou and gives them a pair of long straws. They hold off on their obvious plan until everyone’s put in their lunch orders—a chicken fingers wrap sandwich for Lotor; baked mac and cheese with sweet potato fries for Lance; a bacon, Swiss, and mushroom burger (medium-well) with more sweet potato fries for Ryou; and Shiro rounds things out with the strawberry and grilled chicken salad—but as Shay heads back to the kitchen, Lance winks at Ryou. Ryou smirks back at him.

As they start sharing the milkshake, Shiro has to fight to keep from rolling his eyes. He must not do a very good job of resisting that impulse, given that Lotor steps on his foot and pointedly arches an eyebrow at him. He purses his lips knowingly, as if to remind Shiro that he and Keith would do the exact same thing, if Shiro’s own boyfriend were currently here to indulge him in sharing such a disgustingly adorable romantic moment. The only difference would come down to milkshake flavors, because Shiro would insist on strawberry.

“I have no idea how you guys can drink that,” Shiro mutters so things at the table don’t veer headlong into awkward silence.

“Yeah, we _know_.” Scoffing, Lance casts Shiro a glance that he probably means to be a grade-A side-eye. As it stands, he mostly comes off looking like Shiro just tried to reignite their old debate about whether Hugh Jackman or Ryan Reynolds is better looking. “Anybody could take a two-second look at you and know that you have no idea how _anyone_ could drink a freaking milkshake.”

Resting on his elbows, Shiro folds his hands up on the table. Wringing them and hoping that it’s not _too _obviously visible, Shiro looks to Lotor for… _something_. He doesn’t know what he’s searching for—but the slight, sympathetic shrug he gets is good enough for now. He clings to his own hands, breathing deeply, evenly, and turning Ojiisan’s old maxim over in his head: _“Patience yields focus… Patience yields focus… Patience yields focus…”_

Heaven knows that Shiro needs all the patience he can get in order to deal with Lance right now.

“I was talking about the _flavor_, Sharpshooter.” Should he bring up splitting the strawberry shake with Keith last Friday? Probably not. Probably, Lance would read too much into the fact that Shiro didn’t finish it. Never mind that he _tried_— “The fact that Hunk mixes instant coffee in those milkshakes? Totally kills them for me. I mean, I love coffee? But mixing it with that much sugar just makes everything taste terrible. For me, anyway.”

“Mmm, more for us, I guess,” Lance supposes. “Ditto for our sweet potato fries. No stealing.”

Grinning as if he’s making the greatest joke in human history, Lance kicks at Shiro’s leg again. That self-satisfied expression would make perfect sense—except he’s giving it to Ryou, who seems like he’s trying not to act politely befuddled. He wants his boyfriend to think that they’re on the same page and that Ryou completely follows whatever Lance thinks he’s on about this time, when actually, Ryou has no idea. Unlike most people would feel in his position, Ryou must not see the point in calling Lance out on being a confusing ball of nerves and energy. Probably, he doesn’t want to make things too awkward for himself and Lotor.

Not that there’s much they can do. Sure, Shiro wishes them luck and he hopes that they can make things better for themselves. But there’s an invisible fog up between himself and Lance right now, blocking them from talking to each other like normal people, much less talking like the friends that they’ve allegedly been for the past eight years. Even as Lance silently waggles his eyebrows at Ryou like he wants everyone to think he’s Up To Something, Shiro feels effectively stonewalled. Cut off from one of the people he most values because he dared to do something in the name of his own happiness.

So, he slouches into his and Ryou’s booth, and looks to Lotor instead. “Oh, did I tell you? Maurice got your autographs—”

“I had no doubt in your ex-beau’s ability to do so.” Lotor’s smile should steady Shiro’s nerves instead of making him feel slightly nauseated. That eager, pleasant glimmer in Lotor’s eyes should reassure Shiro that nothing is as hopeless as it might feel, not leave him wishing that he would get sick already because waiting for the other shoe to drop is worse than vomiting. But as Lance kicks Shiro’s leg again, Lotor asks, “Have you heard from him, then?”

“Yeah. He sent an email over the weekend. Then, he called me yesterday, which? Was about the last thing that I expected, considering the going rates for international calls?” Shrugging, Shiro looks out the window at someone walking six dogs at once. “Then again, I guess it doesn’t matter that much. Not when you make bank on training up the next generation of quarterbacks or offensive linemen or whatever other roles are on a hand-egg team.”

Lotor hums, faux-pensively. Nods as though they’re having a Very Serious Debate. “How is Maurice, then?”

“Oh, y’know… Running interference with the press a bit? His nephew bagged a Gold medal on the halfpipe. Which is _great_—”

“Oh, yeah!” Lance pipes up, grinning. “He fucked up Shaun White’s bid for a triple-Gold run, it was _awesome. _Fucking _artistry_.”

As though he hasn’t heard anything, Shiro goes on, “But I guess the poor kid’s been kinda… He’s shy to begin with, y’know? Then, you add in losing his parents and beating one of his own teammates, who’s apparently a pretty big deal—”

“Uh, Shaun White is _more_ than a pretty big deal, Shiro. He’s a living legend in snowboarding—”

“So, it’s been rough on him. Getting so much attention out of the blue. Especially after losing his parents—”

“I can only imagine,” Lotor murmurs, resting his cheek in his palm. “Enduring the most intense scrutiny of the Fourth Estate is a particularly grueling form of Hell even when one _isn’t_ grieving. Personally, I would wish on absolutely no one—except, of course, for Sincline. Because… Well. You know why.”

Shiro nods, because he does know why. Disownment or not, and regardless of how much of a jerk Sincline is, part of Lotor still loves his brother. Part of him still wants to hope that Sincline can get better. Keeping the faith is a Herculean labor when the majority of Sincline’s actions and patterns of behavior suggest that he has no interest in getting better. Worse, the Cizar twins haven’t spoken to each other since Zarkon and Honerva decided that Lotor was no longer their son. Gossip blogs and celebrity trash rags are the only ways that Lotor gets any information about what’s going on in his idiot brother’s life.

In case it helps, Shiro puts on a small smile. Carefully, he reaches around his water and Lotor’s Cherry Coke to squeeze his free hand. Even if all he does is remind Lotor that somebody loves him, that’s better than letting one of his best friends twist around in emotional agony, reminded of how little his own blood family values him and how easily they threw him away.

“Anyway, Maurice said he’d get your autographs in the mail sometime around the middle or end of next week.” Shiro starts to protest when Lotor pulls his hand away, but stifles that objection when he laces their fingers together instead. Hopefully, the smile encourages Lotor, encourages him to keep seeking comfort and affection when he wants. “Maurice thought about just sending them from PyeongChang? But I guess Haxus talked him out of it. Something about not knowing how long the parcel could get held up at customs, I think?”

Quirking his shoulders, Lotor brushes his thumb along the back of Shiro’s hand. “As long as they get to us in whole? I do not mind waiting to receive them, darling. And I hope that you’ve passed my gratitude along to your ex-beau.”

Shiro nods because he _has_ passed on that gratitude. But he cringes on the inside as his mind replays some of the things Maurice actually told him yesterday: _Hunk and Lance lack the proper frame of reference with which to understand your actions… Your desire for your friends’ support does not obligate them to pretend that they have no problems with your actions or with your choices… Could it not be possible that you lack the right frame of reference to understand your friends’ perspectives… You are still giving an undue amount to what other people think of you…_

As if he _knows_ that something needs interrupting, Lance sighs dramatically. “Too bad we don’t have owl-post figured out,” he says, tapping his thumb on the table. “Y’know, like wizards do? Then, Maurice could send Lotor a parcel with his autographs super quickly and without any interference.”

“Unfortunately, JK Rowling’s world-building leaves us with several questions about how Wizards handle imports and customs.” Lotor huffs, giving Shiro’s hand a squeeze as if telling him not to take the obvious bait. “Additionally, as everyone always tells you? Magic is not real—”

“You’re all gonna eat so much crow when I turn out to be _right_ about magic—”

“Furthermore, if magic _were_ real, there is no guarantee that people who could use it would adopt the same animals as parcel-transporting familiars en masse. Considering that real-life owls leave much to be desired, relative to their _Harry Potter_ counterparts? A system of post-owls seems unlikely—”

“Okay, fine, sure—just like how I thought it was unlikely for Shiro to get Hanahaki literally ever.” Glancing around the entire table, from Lotor to Shiro to Ryou, Lance throws up a _“come at me” _shrug. “_And_ I thought it was even unlikelier for him to ever slim down so much and get a set of washboard abs, the way he’s done—”

“Yeah, thanks _so much_ for your support, Sharpshooter,” Shiro deadpans into his palm, rubbing at his temple and wishing that he could disappear. Or teleport back home, at least. If he doesn’t want to listen to this garbage anymore, then he shouldn’t egg Lance on and exacerbate things between them. Shouldn’t even risk that by opening his mouth—and yet: “Because telling me that you didn’t have faith in what I could do? Totally makes me feel like you’re on my team. Like you _care_ about me. Did you read a new self-help book about negotiating with people and supporting your friends recently, or what.”

“Well, did you read some new self-help book about keeping everybody waiting? ‘Cause that’s what you’re doing about your and Ryou’s _birthday_. And it’s not like we’ve got forever and a day to make those plans…” Pointedly arching both eyebrows, Lance slurps on his and Ryou’s milkshake. “Which Hunk was supposed to ask you about. But I guess he doesn’t feel like bringing it up with you and, right now? I don’t think I blame him.”

Shiro doesn’t know if he can blame Hunk, either. At the very best, he can’t hold Hunk accountable for not having the right frame of reference. For failing to understand something that must have happened far too quickly, from his perspective. Why _would_ Hunk want to take point on getting Shiro and Ryou’s birthday get-together organized when he’s upset about Shiro cutting him out of a lengthy process that created a major change? Why _would_ he want to listen to Shiro’s suggestion of going to that Happy Sushi place that Ryou likes, a few towns over? Based on how things have been going lately, Hunk would probably interpret that as Shiro prioritizing his diet over his own happiness and anybody else’s, and ignore the part where Happy Sushi is one of the only places where Shiro can get a salmon roll that can hold a candle to Ojiisan’s.

But even knowing how much sense Hunk’s reluctance makes? Shiro wouldn’t argue with the chance to wake up in somebody else’s life. When Shay finally brings their lunches over, Shiro slouches into his salad and it goes down hard and with an aftertaste like Shiro might have irreparably ruined almost everything, all by going after what he thought he wanted.

At least he and Keith still have their own private outing, Shiro guesses. At least, hopefully, he won’t make a mess of that as well.


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Sheith are stupid, kinky, flirty idiots all over a buffet and Shiro blows Keith in a freezing mall parking lot to a gratuitous Fall Out Boy soundtrack.
> 
> That’s it, that’s the chapter, that’s what happens here.

Shiro and Ryou have their twenty-eighth birthday on a Wednesday, which is fortunate because that’s the day that Sal is most amenable to letting Hunk take any of his allotted time off. They’ve booked the back-corner tables at Happy Sushi with a reservation for twelve—the closest thing that the venue has to a party-room—and the group-dinner will go well. Even considering all of the garbage that’s gone on recently and how much of it has been Shiro’s fault, he refuses to let his little brother’s birthday go badly. Come Hell, high water, or his own bad choices, Shiro _will _make tomorrow night as close to perfect for Ryou as possible, so help him, God.

Assuming that Shiro lives through his and Keith’s private little outing, first.

As soon as Keith gives him permission to pick an outfit for him, Shiro’s faith in his ability to stay alive starts wavering. Choosing clothes for himself was easy: a simple, black button-up, nicer than Shiro really needs to wear and tight enough to let everybody in the restaurant see that he works out. His black jeans are a similar story, showing off his taut thighs and perky backside.

Selecting what Keith wears to dinner, though? Even with Keith’s permission to choose what he most wants to see his boyfriend wear tonight, Shiro haggles between choices for an hour before settling on something. When he_ does_ make up his mind, it’s only because he needs to leave already.

Folding the clothes in the backseat of his car, he can’t stop his heart from pounding so loudly that Keith can no doubt hear it at the bookstore. For all he _wants_ to see Keith wearing this—for all it’s _Shiro’s _birthday and he’s supposed to put his own desires first and foremost—Shiro can’t help the feeling that maybe, Keith will be upset. Maybe he won’t like the outfit, and maybe it won’t properly satisfy him, and maybe Shiro’s selected the exact wrong things.

Not that he knows why any of them _would_ be wrong. He and Keith are heading to the Biggerson’s a couple towns over, because Keith’s gotten glowing recommendations for their buffet and Shiro wants to see how much _“all you can eat” _really means. They aren’t going to a summit on world peace or even to the opera, so there’s no call to get completely gussied up. But all the way to the bookstore, Shiro’s mind dogs him with the thought that he _could_ have picked the wrong outfit. Not even blasting Jack Off Jill does anything to help Shiro make those ideas _go the Hell away_.

When Keith leaves work, meeting Shiro at a meter right outside the shop, Shiro’s mouth goes drier than Death Valley. His head spins as if it _wants_ him to pass out. God, underneath his winter coat, Keith’s only wearing a t-shirt (snug but not too snug), a pair of jeans (increasingly tight, but still Pidge-approved for Keith to wear while they’re at work), and a hoodie that he likely can’t zip up—and the mere sight of him is enough to make Shiro feel like he’s melting into a goopy puddle of death that kinda used be a person. A total _mess_ of a person, granted, because Shiro doesn’t know _how_ to be anything else besides a mess, but an actual human being all the same.

“Hope you picked out something sexy for me. I want our night to be special, y’know.” With an impish grin, Keith drops off his backpack and scoops up his outfit (plus the plastic Stop-N-Shop bag where he can put his dirty clothes). He stops only long enough to peck Shiro on the cheek and promise, “Won’t keep you waiting too long.”

“You’re beautiful,” Shiro tells him, thickly. “Just. However long you need, right?”

When Keith skulks back out ten minutes later, Shiro wonders if _this _is what a heart attack feels like. Keith’s carrying his winter coat, draped it over his arm. He hasn’t buttoned his crimson top shirt, either. Furrowing his brow, Shiro tries to think about the logistics. Did he pick a shirt that Keith _can’t_ button? He didn’t think it was too small, but he might’ve thought wrong? Either way, Shiro gets a full view of how Keith’s belly protrudes, refuses to let anyone ignore it. Why anyone would want to, Shiro can’t fathom for the life of him—but that’s everybody else’s loss.

His old jeans strain to contain his fleshy thighs; as Keith’s legs wobble against each other, Shiro can practically hear the denim groaning. He can’t see Keith’s waistband, but he _can_ make out the way that a pale roll of Keith’s belly droops over the place where it should be. Out along Keith’s sides, more of that soft, beguiling flesh spills out into the open, escaping from the hem of Keith’s white t-shirt and surely crunching the waistband underneath its ample bulk.

If anything, the situation with said shirt is a torment infinitely worse—and Keith can tell. Opening the passenger-side door, he smirks like he’s ever-so-pleased with himself. Jesus Christ, how could he _not_ be, with the way his stomach stretches the thin fabric? How could he _not_ realize exactly what he does to Shiro, with that shirt clinging to his flab so tightly that, courtesy of the nearby streetlamp and how brightly it shines down on them, Shiro can see the hollow of Keith’s belly-button? He’s earned the right to take this pride in himself, and Keith deserves to swim in it for as long as he wants.

Taking a long look at Shiro’s face, Keith stretches his arms above his head instead of sitting down. Pulling the hem of his t-shirt up like that would torture Shiro more than well enough. Would remind him that his boyfriend is, without question, increasingly big, and plush, and the most beautiful thing on two legs—and that, as per their agreement about how tonight should go, Shiro doesn’t get to put his hands on Keith’s body until they’re back in Shiro’s bedroom. And Shiro could live through getting tormented with a sight like that, no matter how much his heart flutters as if it desperately wants to jump ship and leave Shiro fending for himself. For a brief, glimmering moment, Shiro almost feels like he’s getting himself together—

Except Keith decides to twitch his hips as well, and sets his entire torso quivering. As he “works a crick out of his back,” he grunts as if he genuinely means it—but arches himself so that the gorgeous mound of flesh around his middle sticks out, daring Shiro to break the rules, reach out, and _touch it, touch it, touch it, just sink your fingers into his pudge, honestly, it would feel so soft and so nice, you’ve wanted to touch him all day and now he’s here, what could possibly go wrong?_

Plenty of things, probably. Not that Keith would _let_ anything go so wrong that the evening became painful—but Shiro could ruin any of the notions that Keith’s got in mind for him. He could throw off Keith’s ability to give him the first proper birthday celebration that they’re getting since Shiro and Lotor left for USC. Because he doesn’t want to be the jerk who screwed up his boyfriend’s happiness like that, Shiro shoves both hands into his pockets. He balls them into fists and nibbles on the inside of his lip. Forces himself to take the long, slow meditative breaths that ought to help prevent him from doing something well and truly stupid.

Which does not make Keith get in the stupid car and stop shimmying. Swishing from side to side in slow, pendulous motions, his belly draws Shiro’s eye and refuses to let him look away. Shiro’s cheeks flush, watching that beautiful pudge wobble and shake. Sure, he’ll have the freedom to grope and caress however much he wants after they go have dinner—but for now, all Shiro can do is hope his whining doesn’t sound _too_ piteous. Pray that Keith doesn’t mind him squirming with desire and anxiety like this.

Judging by the wink Keith throws out there, he doesn’t mind at all. “Think you made a good call on the outfit?”

“Mhm.” Shiro should say something else. But not something _stupid_. He needs to keep himself together, needs to come up with something romantic and witty and charming that lets Keith know exactly how much he—“But, I mean? Y’know, it’s like? You’re here, and it’s all—_your_ pants are the ones that are supposed to get too tight tonight, remember? I mean, you _know_ that, right?”

Keith grins like he’s having either the best or the worst idea that either of them will ever have. “Babe, if my pants getting tight doesn’t make _your_ pants get tight in different ways? Then I’m gonna be giving you a really shitty birthday. Which is something that I just morally cannot approve of. Anyway, here’s the pièce de résistance—at least, for now…”

Inhaling deeply, Keith sucks in his belly. He tugs his t-shirt’s hem and can’t get it to stay down.

As it inches back up his middle, Keith focuses on the buttons. On tugging them together and finagling them through their holes. He makes relatively quick work of it, smirking each time he fumbles or pulls on the cotton-blend, and subsequently makes Shiro gasp, or whine, or bite down harder on his lip. Jesus, what Keith does to Shiro… The night is barely in its infancy, and Keith’s already getting Shiro more keyed up than a cheating bastard’s pretty little souped-up four-wheel-drive.

Even with his stomach pulled back, the fabric between Keith’s buttons bows out in the way that Shiro recognizes far too well. No, they’re not ready to pop—but they quiver when Keith exhales and lets his belly surge out to its full glory, teasing Shiro with the idea that they might come off before Keith’s even eaten anything. Struggling to encompass his body, the shirt wrinkles along his sides and refuses to get anywhere near his waistband. It’s like a Russian nesting doll effect: the crimson button-up can’t come down far enough and reveals a strip of plain white t-shirt. This, in turn, comes down further, but still leaves that pretty, pale pudge exposed, looking so soft and warm and kissable, with a hint of stretch-marks peeking through.

“So, what do we think?” Brushing his palm along his stomach’s outward curve, Keith pouts as if this is actually a question. When all Shiro can manage is blushing and stammering at him, Keith turns to let him see the back-view, and holy God almighty—

“I wanna leave hickeys on your love-handles,” Shiro blurts out before he can think better of it.

Like magic, that gets Keith to slip into the freaking car already.

Like he’s completely innocent and has absolutely no idea what he does to Shiro, he leans over the center console and snags a quick kiss.

“Buy me dinner first,” he teases, poking Shiro on the nose. “And then we’ll talk about hickeys.

***** ***** *****

Driving to Biggerson’s, the name of Shiro’s game is keeping his eyes on the road, only glancing to his right while held up at red lights.

Easier said than done, with Keith slouched next to him and looking so nice. His tummy pooches out more than usual, all pudgy and round, protruding into his lap and pressing out against his button-up without destroying anything just yet. Whenever he sighs, Shiro half-expects to hear the tell-tale rip and clacking of plastic hitting plastic. Almost lets himself believe that Keith’s belly might surge forward from its confines and spill out all the way, before Keith’s even eaten dinner.

But that doesn’t happen, and he needs to focus on getting them to the restaurant in one piece. Yes, he could so easily reach out and touch Keith—but they’d have a very bad night indeed if Shiro wrecked the car and landed both of them in the hospital.

With their luck, Sven would have a graveyard shift in the ER and rub their faces in what an idiot his cousin is.

At least things start looking up when they get inside of Biggerson’s. Shiro can stare at Keith without risk of either of them dying. Except Shiro might miss out on the rest of the show, which would be a tragedy.

Starting with the toothpick-skinny redhead at the hostess stand, people don’t want to take their eyes off Keith. Trailing along beside him, Shiro stays close. He keeps his hand on the small of Keith’s back, angles his chest toward Keith, gives him the most adoring smiles, so that no one can doubt the fact that they’re here together. Wide-eyed, the hostess puckers her glitter glossed-up lips as if she’s sucking on hard candy made out of concentrated disapproval. After asking how many are in their party, she drags her tongue along her teeth and grimaces what is probably meant to be some kind of customer service smile.

“Mmm, just the two of us, right, Baby?” Shiro smirks at her with an unspoken dare to say what’s on her mind. “And could you set us up with a booth? He’s been on his feet all day, his back is killing him.”

The hostess nods and scoops up the menus like she can’t wait to get rid of Keith and Shiro. As she leads them down a row of booths, heading for one of the two-seaters closer to the buffet, Shiro keeps his hand on Keith, where it belongs. Now that they’re together, he has so much lost time to make up for. At the moment, it certainly draws attention: every patron they walk past either openly stares at Keith and Shiro, or stares intently at their tables, trying to look like they _aren’t_ staring.

Pressing his hip into Keith’s chubby side, Shiro caresses his hip. Nosing at Keith’s temple, he sinks his palm into Keith’s warm, supple pudge. Feeling up a roll of flab, he gives Keith’s flesh a jostle—not too hard but not too gentle, only enough to remind Keith that his body is the most beautiful thing in Shiro’s life, short of Keith’s perfect eyes and what they have together. When he catches a pair of guys gaping from another table, Shiro moves his hand down to squeeze Keith’s plush, perfect ass. That does nothing to make the guys stop gawking—doesn’t even make them blush as if they realize how obnoxious it is to stare—so, Shiro winks at them.

Whether or not Shiro’s intent comes across as clearly as he wants, he knows what he’s saying. Less, _“I’m going to make it with this fat-ass and leave him begging me for another round” _and more, _“I’m the luckiest person alive, being here with this gorgeous man and his beautiful, fat ass.”_

In the name of making sure Keith knows what’s going on—making sure that everyone who’s watching them gets a better sense of what Shiro means to do—he nuzzles at Keith’s hair. He kisses the top of Keith’s head and then his temple. He whispers, _“I love you so much” _—more for Keith than anyone, but if their audience can hear, then Shiro doesn’t mind.

He only lets up on the PDA so they can sit down. After all, eating while standing up would quickly get uncomfortable for both of them. Aside from the increased risk of choking, neither of them would get to properly appreciate the full extent of the show. The other patrons get to watch—lucky bastards—but this is for Keith and Shiro, above all others. Everyone else around here only enters the picture inasmuch as they keep reacting to what Keith and Shiro get up to this evening.

As Keith settles into his side of the booth, he smiles and Shiro wonders what things might be like when Keith fills up the entire bench. His pudge already billows out far enough that only Lance could squeeze in next to him (and even that would be a tight fit). Opposite them, a couple of white-haired older ladies keep glancing toward Keith in particular. One full-on clutches at her pearl necklace when Keith stretches out and drops his hand to pat the fullest part of his stomach. God, in short order, it’s going to get even fuller—even rounder, stuffed as far as Keith will let Shiro go with anything that Shiro knows Keith eats—and the thought of how Keith’s belly might look by the time they pay the bill?

It’s almost enough to make Shiro faint. Almost enough to make him feel sick.

“Are you sure about this, Babe,” Keith says, putting on a pout and batting his eyelashes. Although he refrains from yelling, he also doesn’t lower his voice as much as they normally do in restaurants. Good—letting people hear the banter is part of the fun. “I mean, look at me—”

“Mmm, I’m looking. And I like what I see. Always do—”

“C’mon, you can’t be this obtuse. You _know_ what I mean—”

“You’re telling me to look at you, Baby. Well…” Humming faux-pensively, Shiro props his chin up in his palm. Wearing a smile like he has no idea what he’s doing, he leans toward Keith—and under the table, he bats his foot at Keith’s ankle. “I see the most beautiful man in the universe. And I know how lucky I am to be here with him.”

In unison, the blue-hairs staring at them arch their eyebrows. Out of the corner of his eyes, Shiro watches the one without a pearl necklace twist her fingers up in a napkin. Her hands tremble and the paper goes so tight around her knuckles, it must be a miracle that nothing rips. As much as he knows better than to be too obnoxious, Shiro smirks. He brushes his foot up and down Keith’s calf, nudging his ankle into the accumulation of chub with admirable muscle hidden underneath.

_Eat your heart out, Gladys_, he muses, grinning as Keith wriggles in his seat and tries to tug his t-shirt down. _Maybe you and Muriel don’t realize what’s going on? But you’re getting a show that most people have to pay to see._

As the t-shirt’s hem inches up his tummy again, Keith huffs. He throws Shiro a set of pleading puppy eyes that very nearly makes him look like he doesn’t enjoy his extra weight. It’s a nice touch. Makes him sound so much more convincing when he says, “You don’t need to flatter me, Babe. You know that, right?”

“Who’s flattering you? I’m saying that you’re beautiful. My gorgeous, amazing boyfriend, who—”

“It’s not like I don’t know what’s happened since we got together.” Keith squirms, ducking his chin to make it seem like he’s blushing. “I wasn’t like this, y’know—I used to be so _thin_, and I went to the gym every day instead of letting myself go—I mean? You fell in love with the high school soccer star, Babe. Not with all of _this_—”

“Where did he go, exactly?” Shiro shrugs. Smiles like he has no idea what they’re talking about or what Keith could possibly have in mind. “If the high school soccer captain’s not sitting here with me right now? Then I’m confused, Baby. Because I’m looking right at him—”

“How can you _say_ that? Are you _trying_ to hurt me? Or lie to me?”

Pouting like he could cry at any moment, Keith drops both hands into his lap. He squishes them into the sides of his belly and pushes his chub forward. Thankfully, the buttons hold, even as Keith bounces the mountain of doughy flesh he’s gained around his midsection, making all of that luscious flab jiggle and wobble. The way his shirts cling to his body even gives Shiro a glimpse of Keith’s fuller, thicker pecs get in on the action. No, he hasn’t grown any moobs just yet—but his chest moves up and down so nicely, following the rhythm as Keith jostles his gut.

“I _know_ I’m getting fat, Babe. You don’t have to pretend that you don’t see it.” Keith’s lips curl up so tightly, into a parody of genuine hurt. But hopefully, his fine-tuned skills will sell the other patrons on his act. “I don’t know how you can even stand to be _seen_ with me… I look like such a whale, and you could have _anybody_—”

“But I _want_ you. Whatever shape or size you’re in.” Huffing softly, Shiro traces his foot all the way up to Keith’s knee. Teasing it toward those plump, plush inner-thighs, he looks Keith in the eye. “If you’re _serious_ about a diet, Baby, then we’ll get started on that soon. But on tonight of all nights? You can afford to go easy on yourself. Let me treat you—”

Before Shiro can get _too_ carried away in that line of thought, a waitress bounces over to them. With Keith’s permission—_“If you meant what you said, Babe? Then… I had a long day, you know what I like” _—Shiro informs her that they’ll be getting the adult all-you-can-eat special. Two of them. Then, he’ll have some water and the largest mug of black coffee that she can give him. As for his boyfriend, they need a Cherry Coke and the ultra-sized, triple-chocolate fudge milkshake—with _extra_ whipped cream on top.

“And, uh? Do you do anything special for birthdays?” Shiro smiles fondly and bats his toes at Keith’s ankle. “My boyfriend’s turning twenty-five today. So, whatever you can do to make him feel like the prince he is?”

The waitress purses her lips and taps the end of her pen along her pad. “Well, we do have a special dessert for birthdays? We have the dessert and sundae bar, as always? It comes separately from the rest of the buffet, but—”

“We need two trips there as well, then.” Shiro likely won’t be going for himself—but it’s only fair to pay for two people’s food, when that’s how much Keith intends to eat (and then some). “Let’s get them ordered now and make things easier for everyone.”

Jotting that down, the waitress nods. “But we have another birthday treat, too? We have dessert specials, and the birthday person can pick any that they want? Free of charge, of course.” Smiling at Keith, she adds, “Happy birthday, by the way.”

With a hum, Shiro clicks his tongue. “Does the menu have calorie counts on it? Or any other nutritional information—”

“If there’s any allergies we need to be aware of? We can make accommodations—”

“No, he’s fine about allergies, it’s just…” Shiro affects a sad sigh and gives Keith the best frown of concern that he can manage. “His family’s been getting on his case, lately. They don’t appreciate his happiness like they should. They’ve been pressuring him about a die—”

“Just having the calorie counts on the menu is fine.” Mouth screwed up tight, Keith kicks Shiro in the shin. He waits for the waitress to leave before slouching and fixing Shiro with a dull-eyed, unimpressed _look_. Barely above a whisper, he says, “Pro-tip: going into detail like that when no one asked? That’s part of what’s so weird about the stuff you do in our clips. It makes your performances a little…”

Keith makes a throaty noise that screams how much he doesn’t want to hurt his boyfriend’s feelings. “Look, there’s a lot to be said for passion? And a lot to be said for commitment? But you’re like the verbal equivalent of Bambi learning how to walk when you splutter out all that stuff.”

“Duly noted. Tone down the overselling it. Just… be in the moment.”

“Let yourself have fun. Enjoy what we’re doing. Don’t think about it so much, and don’t worry about what you’re doing. If anything jumps out that I want you to do differently? I’ll tell you.” Keith leans toward Shiro with a gleam in his eyes like a cat teasing at the door of a canary cage. “We’re here having fun for your birthday. Everyone else is getting a free show. All you need to do? Is feed me and enjoy yourself.”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Shiro sighs. Dimly, he wonders if acting’s _ever_ going to be as easy as Keith, Lance, and Lotor make it sound and look—but they can handle that issue later. For now, Shiro gives Keith a small, tight smile. “D’you want me to get you your first plate? And any special requests for it, if you do?”

Shaking his head, Keith runs his palm up and down his stomach. “Surprise me, Babe. You know what I like.”

That’s a pretty dangerous offer to throw at Shiro—but Keith grins like he’s more than up for the challenge. As he fumbles around the buffet, looking for both their meals, Shiro can’t help wondering if _he_ can keep up with _Keith’s_ appetite. It’ll be one thing for him to sit there after finishing his own dinner, watching intently while Keith stuffs his face with everything that Shiro brings him. If Shiro falls down on the job of keeping his Baby satisfied, though? If he fails to do right by Keith when their good time tonight _depends_ on Shiro’s ability to do right by Keith? That’s going to make everything kind of a mess, and it could put Keith in a bad mood, and it could ruin tomorrow night as well, if they’re not careful—

Staring down the myriad of options before him at the buffet, Shiro halts. Inhales deeply and grips on tighter to the plate. The hot ceramic digs at his fingers and he sighs. At least it’s easy to pick out a salad and some grilled chicken for himself. He spoons vegetables and sauce onto his plate as well, since balance requires that Shiro get more in his meals than protein and barely enough calories to break even. Drumming his fingertips on the bar, he sighs. Says a silent prayer of thanks that his head’s still clear and his thoughts aren’t racing, and he feels… pretty okay, all things considered?

Which does nothing to help him decide what to get for Keith. But glancing over his shoulder, back toward the booth, Shiro smiles. Even the back of Keith’s head reminds him: they’ve got all the time they need, and Keith doesn’t _need_ each plate to be perfect. He only needs each plate to come to the table and for Shiro to pay attention while he goes to town.

As he settles into his side of the booth, Shiro blushes. First of all, the difference between his plate and Keith’s makes his head spin, now that he can look at them more closely. Shiro left so much white space on his own, only adding a sliver of this Altean vegetable casserole that he recognizes because Coran makes it so well, while Keith’s food spills absolutely everywhere, with appetizers crammed in wherever Shiro could squeeze them. Not only does Keith’s first helping threaten to leave his plate and hit the table, there’s also food piled on top of food, with entrees and hors d’oeuvres alike mixing together in ways that Keith usually can’t stand.

His eyes light up as Shiro nudges the plate toward him—but Shiro can’t take his eyes off of Keith’s mouth.

More specifically, he can’t stop staring at Keith’s _teeth_.

Zeroing in further, Shiro’s caught up in and gawking at the cherry trapped between Keith’s incisors. Plump, and red, and glimmering underneath the lights. Right up front, where Shiro couldn’t possibly miss it, no matter what he did.

His breath hitches in his throat as Keith twists the stem between his fingertips. Slowly—so painfully, agonizingly slowly that Shiro shivers, gets a chill like he might start hacking azaleas all over their evening before they’ve truly gotten started—Keith kneads the cherry with his teeth.

Then, he slurps it into his mouth. He rips off the stem with a contented sigh. As if he really needed to seduce his boyfriend harder, Keith grins and throws Shiro a smug, knowing wink. Underneath the table, he kicks at Shiro’s ankle like a kitten toying with a ball of string.

Picking up his fork is the only thing that keeps Shiro’s hands from shaking. The only thing that keeps him from reaching across the table, sending their dinner to the floor, and jerking Keith over to kiss him full on his beautiful, perfect mouth where all the waitstaff and fellow patrons can watch him do it. Once Shiro has the metal edge digging at his fingers, all he can do is keep breathing (more or less) evenly. Keep telling himself that everything will be fine. Tonight’s about fun and he hasn’t done anything wrong, not yet. Even if he maybe runs the risk of somehow screwing up, it won’t cause Armageddon. He and Keith can adapt, roll with whatever comes up and keep going—

“Mmmm, you went all out on spoiling me tonight, huh?” Keith’s smile glitters like a razor-blade. “Y’know, I’m never gonna have a successful diet if you keep treating me like this.”

Bashfully, hoping that Keith finds him endearing, Shiro shrugs. “I mean? What kind of boyfriend wouldn’t treat you to the best on your birthday, Baby?” He tries to spear his chicken. Instead, his fork clinks against the ceramic. As if Keith couldn’t hear or see that happening, Shiro grins. “Besides, who says that I even _want_ you on a diet? You’re always perfect, no matter what you look like or how much you weigh.”

“Maybe _you_ don’t want me to lose any weight. I _know_ what people have been saying, though…” Keith forces a sigh and almost sells the weariness behind it—anyone eavesdropping probably won’t be able to tell how much he’s lying. He slouches, prodding his own fork at a clump of sticky, gooey macaroni and cheese and no doubt, making his belly pooch out closer to his lap. Glancing guiltily at his milkshake, he props his chin up in his palm. “Everybody _knows_ what you’re like at the gym, and I mean? _You_ clearly don’t have any problems sticking to a meal plan…”

“But you’re not me, Baby. And you…”

Shiro trails off as Keith finally digs in. Scooping a heap of the macaroni and cheese onto his fork, he shovels it past his lips. He barely makes it; the noodles topple into his mouth, rather than slipping onto the table. He moans so deeply around the fork that Shiro feels that sound vibrating in the pit of his own chest. Or maybe he’s imagining things. Keith is gorgeous, either way. He leans his head back as he chews, giving up a throaty sound that doesn’t go as far as he _could_—but why would he, on the first bite? He knows how to tease.

Using his hand, Keith pops a mini-quiche into his mouth. Vaguely, Shiro thinks it’s one of the ham-and-cheese numbers. Whichever flavor it is, though, Keith savors chewing it. Goes slowly, even though drawing things out for too long is a good way for him to feel fuller, faster. It forces you to pay attention to how much you’re eating and how your body feels. It gives your brain more time to fire off the signals that you’ve got no more room left in your stomach. On the other hand, it gives Shiro more time to appreciate the sounds Keith’s making, to marvel at the _idea_ of how much food Keith’s going to put away tonight.

But Shiro clears his throat and shakes his head. “You’re not me, Baby,” he says, trying his best to not to ignore the way Keith sighs and licks his fingers. “You don’t _need_ to keep on any sort of diet. Or starve yourself to look like some pin-up boy. Or whatever, I—”

“I’ll never starve with you around.” Dropping one hand to pat his belly, Keith picks up a veggie spring roll with the other. He furrows his brow as if the thing’s talking to him, insisting that its name is Gerald and Keith’s been chosen to fight crime as a magical boy. “Seems like a weird choice to have on a buffet at _Biggerson’s_.”

Shiro quirks his shoulders. “They’re trying to have more international flair, I guess?”

Whatever Keith’s thinking, he puckers his lips and slips the entire spring roll through them.

Shiro’s lungs squirm in his chest, hot, and longing, and angry. He hates everything and he wants to scream.

Not that this gives Keith any pause. Not that anything _could _make Keith stop, once he really gets started on his food. Short of Shiro getting himself into trouble, nothing can dissuade Keith from the task at hand. With his mouth open so wide, it might have unhinged at the jaw, Keith wolfs down everything on his plate—two thick rolls of white bread, crafted into rosettes and gleaming with a greasy, Parmesan glaze; three more spring rolls and four more mini-quiches of varying flavors; a huge, heaping pile of fettuccine noodles with marinara sauce and five massive meatballs stacked on top of it; and the mac and cheese that Keith has yet to finish—as though there’s treasure hidden at the bottom.

There isn’t. Not unless someone wants to count a chance to sop up leftover marinara with one of the Parmesan rosettes. But Keith doesn’t mind the lack of a reward. By the time he slumps back in his seat, Shiro’s only halfway done with his salad, never mind the grilled chicken or the casserole. Partly, he just eats slowly in the hopes of keeping his own weight down, the way that he learned to do out in Los Angeles.

Mostly, though, he’s too busy gaping at the work his boyfriend does, at the way Keith’s cheeks expand as he stuffs food in them.

With that first plate down, Keith’s belly has started rounding out. Nowhere near as much as it can do—given how much food Keith can fill himself up with, when he really sets himself to pushing his limits and going for the Gold, he’s barely getting started—but with his outfit clinging to his flesh like that? With his t-shirt starting to ride up, the rising hem visible through the gaps between his buttons? With the way that over-shirt strains to keep Keith covered? His glorious stomach looks fuller than it maybe should. Seem like it’s edging closer to his lap than it likely is. Sure, he’s an impressive sight to behold, and Shiro can barely make himself swallow because Keith’s so magnetic—so _amazing _—and Shiro always can’t keep his mouth closed well enough to eat. Still, Keith isn’t _quite_ as full as Shiro’s mind wants to imagine.

Leaning his head back against the seat, Keith sighs and lets his stomach push out further—but as he does, none of his buttons come off. That’s evidence enough that they have yet more ground to cover. Regardless of the fact that Shiro still has his own food to eat, watching Keith stroke his tummy is ample cause to go back to the buffet for him.

This time, Shiro comes back with two plates for his Baby, each one about as overloaded as the last round that Shiro dished up for him. Lips puckered around his straw, Keith stares at this offering on the altar of his belly. He lets slip a soft, _“Ooooh” _but sucks down another two gulps of milkshake before he sets his glass down and gets back to work on eating. A quick glance at his drink-but-kinda-dessert suggests that Keith’s well on his way to filling in some of his belly’s nooks and crannies: there isn’t that much milkshake left in his glass, and he still has the remainder in the oversized silver cup.

As Keith pokes his fork around between the chicken enchiladas and the herb-roasted potatoes, Shiro handles refilling Keith’s milkshake glass. He wrinkles his nose, dimly wondering if the ultra-sized milkshakes have gotten bigger since the last time Shiro set foot in a Biggerson’s. It’s been about two-and-a-half years, so they might have done—but with Keith batting a foot against his ankle, Shiro can’t focus on remembering for sure.

“If I didn’t know any better, Babe?” Keith jabs his fork into a particularly large cube of potato, smirking like he’s having either the best idea that he’s had this month, or the worst idea that he’s had in the past six weeks. “If I didn’t _know_ that there’s no way you’d ever want to date an enormous tub of lard? I’d almost think you’re _sabotaging_ me about slimming down.”

“I’m not—what are you—it isn’t like—I don’t exactly?” Blushing hotter than an active volcano (over the accusation _and_ the way that Keith moans like a bad porno around his potatoes), Shiro slumps back in his seat. Trying to keep himself breathing, he takes a long drink of water and lets his legs splay out however they want to fall. He shakes his head and lies, “I don’t know what you mean by that, actually? I’m really, _really_ not sure what you think—”

“You could make better potatoes than this in your sleep, just so you know.” Which would be a nice compliment—if not for Keith stuffing an entire crabcake into his mouth. It doesn’t seem like he takes enough time to chew it properly. But Keith doesn’t choke, doesn’t even get food going down the wrong pipe. When he’s cleared out his mouth, he drags a hand back through his hair. “I mean, you can’t deny how this situation looks, right? I know the way I used to be. I know I was so skinny, and fit, and taut? Nothing at _all_ like the bloated, flabby fat-ass that I’ve turned into, in the past few months…”

Despite what he’s saying, Keith pops the second crabcake past his lips. Even though it can’t be as good as you’d get at a nicer place, Keith twists up his face like he has a vibrator going at his prostate. Sinking into his side of the booth, he throws his head back with a sound that’s halfway between gasp and moan. Both hands drop down to his stomach, stroking up and down the sides without pressing into his flesh too hard. Still, he draws Shiro’s eyes in like they’re magnetically stuck on Keith’s body.

“So, I keep trying to lose the weight for you,” Keith goes on, pouting too much for Shiro to believe him, though he might fool someone else.

“I don’t think you _need_ to lose any weight, Baby. I keep telling you—”

“I’ve got these thunder thighs trying to pop all my seams…” He squirms, rubbing his thighs together and jostling his stomach. That thick mound of flesh wobbles back and forth like a snake trying to mesmerize its prey. Keith only stops wiggling so he can grab up the biggest garlic knot on his plates. But as he scarfs it down, his belly keeps moving and Shiro’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. “Not that I’m _helping _myself any, eating like a pig, the way I do—”

“No, Baby, come on? You know I don’t think that. What are you saying—”

“What am I _saying_?” Rolling his eyes and sucking down another garlic knot, Keith gives Shiro a look of pity. “I’m _saying_ that I’ve blubbered out like a freaking _land-whale_, lately. Jeez, I’ve got these love-handles, now. And I know you’ve _got_ to hate them because why _wouldn’t_ you.” As if it emphasizes his point, Keith pushes his shirts up ever-so-slightly and pinches up pretty sizable handfuls of his pudgy sides. Shiro’s breath catches in his throat again—but Keith just shakes his supple flesh, knots his brow, and juts out his lip like he might cry at any moment. “Look at how _flabby_ I’m getting, Babe. How can you _not_ hate this? I’m_ disgusting_.”

“That’s really not the word I’d use, okay? Whether you believe me or not, Baby—”

Shiro cuts himself off, this time. He can’t help it. Not when Keith rips another Parmesan rosette in half.

Shiro’s brow knots up and he scrunches his nose. While he blinks, dumbfounded, at the sight before him, Keith grabs three little plastic tubs of butter out of the condiment-carrier by the wall. Blissfully ignoring the stares he’s getting from the old ladies behind them and the youngish guy and girl who’ve just sat down, Keith globs a full helping of butter on each half of the roll, then splits the third pad pretty evenly. Shiro covers his mouth, in case it gets any ideas about running off without his permission to say anything. As his eyes go wide enough to hurt, Shiro watches Keith stuff his third crabcake in between the hunks of bread. He grips his jaw so tightly, he vaguely wonders if he’ll break it.

Keith winks at him. Flashes a grin as he lifts the makeshift sandwich to his lips. Shiro barely chokes down a whimper as Keith licks his teeth. Watching Keith’s mouth fall, open and gaping, Shiro gnaws at the mounds beneath his fingers. He doesn’t _mean_ to. But he’s clinging too fast to his own mouth, and Keith stretches his lips _so far_, enveloping most of his prize at once.

As if it’s nothing, Keith chomps clean through the sandwich. His teeth crack against each other, and he tosses his head back, moaning about how _goddamn good_ the food is. Shiro catches his breath, but it doesn’t feel right. A rush still slams into his head like he’s stood up too quickly. His lungs expand when he inhales, but he’d swear that no air actually gets into him.

Keith polishes off the sandwich in two bites, and Shiro can barely keep himself from groaning. He flops onto his elbows. Sitting up takes too much effort, with Keith carrying on like this. No matter how big his hand is—no matter how much of his face he’s covered—Shiro’s probably gone red all over. Heat prickles along the tips of his ears as Keith licks his fingers clean. As Keith digs into the enchiladas on his second plate, Shiro’s knees thwack into each other. A moan claws at the back of his throat and his legs flail and Jesus, he’s _pathetic_, right? It’s not like he hasn’t seen Keith doing this before. Hell, back at home, he can watch Keith doing this with food that Shiro whipped up _for_ him.

Except Keith’s eating like this _for him_, whether Shiro made the food himself or not.

On another hand (maybe on a tentacle or a dorsal fin), slouching over gives Shiro a much better view of Keith’s midsection. Maybe the table doesn’t completely obstruct his view while he’s sitting up—but leaning closer lets Shiro see more of how Keith’s belly has expanded, so far. Lets him soak in the sight of what Keith’s efforts have wrought on his frame, how round and full he’s looking, how much bigger his tummy’s getting.

Yes, Keith still has room to stuff, but there’s a mound rising, smallish for now and smack dab in the center of his paunch. Straining his clothes, pushing out harder against the buttons and making the t-shirt expose more of Keith’s skin, that swell looks firmer than the rest of Keith’s belly, packed increasingly tight as Keith crams in more food. Lurking right there underneath Keith’s soft pudge like a cat that jumps on your face by way of demanding snuggles, that bulge begs Shiro to reach out and touch it. Of course, he can’t. Not yet. Even if he _could_ fit into the other side of the booth with Keith, Shiro agreed that he wouldn’t rub Keith’s belly until after they leave. It might clue someone else in about exactly how intentional the scene they’re causing is.

Each time Keith exhales, though, the buttons quiver and Shiro’s breath snags in his throat. Each time, he hopes to hear a rip, and a pop, and the tell-tale clacking of plastic on the metal post that their table rests on. Each time, Shiro ends up unsatisfied because Keith still hasn’t burst his way out of this too-small outfit. But as Keith keeps eating, the curve of his belly gets fuller and fuller. As he sucks down more food, his shirt’s fabric wrinkles more around his middle. No doubt, Keith will soon destroy his top—and that thought sends Shiro’s legs flailing at thin air.

Keith’s finishing his heap of enchiladas when Shiro’s calf knocks into his. Mid-chew, he pauses. Swallowing thickly, he glances around the restaurant like he’s looking for a hidden camera. Bubblegum pink flushes onto his cheeks and he ducks his chin, giving Shiro a demure little smile.

“I guess somebody likes what he sees, huh?” Keith keeps his voice low, and his first forkful of baked cheese tortellini is reasonably-sized. Eating for pleasure and enjoyment, not for the sake of drawing attention and causing a scene. A private moment—no characters or games, just him and Shiro. “Is _your_ food okay, Babe?”

Shiro nods. Forces himself to lower his hand. “I can’t put it away like you can anymore,” he says, tightly and hoping that he doesn’t betray how much he wants to ride Keith, right here in public. “But ‘s a good dinner.”

“Mmm, mine too.” Another three forkfuls of tortellini go down before he adds, “Get me some more of these, when you go up next? And some more of the enchiladas, too? They’re all _really_ good, tonight.”

“Anything you want, Baby.”

While Keith polishes off the tortellini, Shiro rests one of his legs on Keith’s calf. Not trying to push for anything, just letting his hard muscle brush up on Keith’s chub, letting himself relish in this secret contact.

As Keith gives his attention to the lasagna, which takes up most of one plate, Shiro rubs his calf against Keith’s ever so gingerly. Maybe it’s not part of what they agreed on beforehand or part of the scene they came up with, but there’s nothing wrong with giving Keith positive reinforcement. Besides, the version of himself that Shiro’s playing _would_ encourage Keith in subtler ways. For months now, his character has been asking if Keith had enough food, covertly doling out bigger and bigger portions for him during meals, and nudging the number Keith sees on the scale ever upwards. Stroking his ankle up and down Keith’s leg while he’s eating? Perfect idea.

Although Keith’s cheeks twinge cherry red, his eyes get an eager glint that screams, _“Bring it on, Pretty Boy.”_ He wolfs down the lasagna in about two minutes.

As if it’s a reward, Shiro toes out of his shoe and slithers his toes along Keith’s ankle. The only things left on Keith’s plate are the cheddar-and-garlic mashed potatoes and sautéed asparagus. He’s amazing, Keith really is, and making sure he knows this is one of Shiro’s sacred duties as Keith’s boyfriend. While he groans around a decent spoonful of potatoes, Shiro works his foot up Keith’s calf. He rubs at Keith’s flesh on the way, taking his sweet time, only letting himself get up to Keith’s knee when his Baby’s almost done.

Twirling a spear of asparagus in his fingers, Keith shoots Shiro an incredulous look. He can’t be upset about Shiro’s advanced game of footsie—can he? He’d _tell Shiro_ if he genuinely minded, right? If he wanted Shiro to stop?

Chomping down on the asparagus, Keith drops his free hand to the fullest part of his belly. He could rest it there, or brush gentle circles around his flesh, or pinch up his chub, subtly telling Shiro that he has yet more room to fill inside that gut. Instead, Keith sticks two fingertips into one of the ovals bowing out between his buttons. He digs at his fleshy stomach, pushing both his pudge and his bloat back so far that his shirts drift back down. Not enough to fool anyone into thinking that they actually fit him, but Keith gets a bit more wiggle room from the fabric, almost like he’s sucking in his stomach for real.

He must go hard, judging by the way he winces. He coaxes a deep belch out of himself, and Shiro chokes down the impulse to gasp.

Then, Keith jerks his hand away. His belly flops back out, surging forward and pushing his shirts back up. His buttons tremble. He groans from getting that release. He slouches and his stomach skirts even closer to his lap—but those stupid, stubborn buttons only seem to cling on harder.

“Making me eat my vegetables isn’t gonna help if I keep stuffing myself like this. They don’t magically fix problems just because they’re green.” Picking up another piece of asparagus, Keith almost deadpans this. He rests his pudgy cheek in his palm and gives up a vaguely weary huff. “I really _have_ been trying to slim down again.”

Shiro sighs sympathetically. “I know you have, Baby. But you don’t need—”

“People never used to stare at us when we went out together—”

“Let them look. How much I love you isn’t their business. Neither is your weight.”

“But I can’t stand the way they _judge_ you for it.” Keith forces a whine and scarfs down two pieces of asparagus at once. “Staring at you like they think you’re broken or something. Scowling at you, ‘Wow, he must be stringing that poor, desperate, stupid fat-ass along. He must be such a jerk ‘cause no one would _ever_ want to be with such a chunky, jiggling, wide-load tub of lard’—”

“_I_ want to be with you. Whether you’re skinny or fat. You could be five-hundred pounds and I’d love you all the same—”

“I just want you to take me places without people thinking you’re a total heel—”

“I don’t _care_ what they think of me, Baby.” Shiro tongues at his lip, glancing down at Keith’s plate. Two spears left. Forcing himself to look away from Keith’s stomach, putting on his warmest smile, Shiro promises, “All I care about is _you_.”

“Then why won’t you let me care about _you_?” Keith slumps back in the booth and slurps down one spear. Patting his belly, he refuses to let Shiro focus on anything else. The dull, drumming sounds he makes with each tap catch Shiro, and the sight of Keith’s bulging middle ensures him like it won’t let go. “I try _so hard_ to watch what I eat for you. I’ve been going to the gym, even though I get so _winded_ and all I do is _jiggle_ and _sweat_ and _chafe_—”

Shiro covers his mouth again, so nobody else can hear him whimpering at that idea. Jesus, this might really be the thing that murders Shiro. He should be chiming in, or at least listening better to the dirty-talk Keith’s giving him.

But Shiro’s heart races, going ten miles a minute, and his head swims, swamped down so badly that he can barely pick out his thoughts. All this over the mental image of Keith in a pair of too-snug gym-shorts and a thin t-shirt that rides up on his glorious, pudgy gut and leaves his stretch-marks all out in the open… His thick, flabby thighs wobbling up against each other, skin chafing while his bulk rubs the fabric raw… Belly bouncing up and down as he pounds the treadmill, softened pecs jiggling, cheeks flushing crimson as he sweats enough that he could win a wet t-shirt contest—

Another belch from Keith stops that thought in its tracks. Lets Shiro catch his breath again. At least until he looks down and sees Keith’s empty plates. His head reels like someone’s punched him. Dragging his eyes over the porcelain doesn’t give him any clues about what he should do next. About what his character would do, in this position. All Shiro has is a pressing urge to jump his boyfriend, and his foot edging further up Keith’s leg.

As if he can tell what’s up, Keith clears his throat. Gently kicks at Shiro’s shin. “What’re you thinking about?”

“Nothing, I… Just how beautiful you are?” Shiro throws Keith a hopeful, bashful grin. Almost chokes on his own breath at the blush lighting up Keith’s face like fireworks. God, they could leave now and damn the button-popping… Except as Shiro prods his toes toward Keith’s lap, he says, “How are you feeling, Baby?”

Groaning, Keith slouches in his seat. “_Starving_, and I don’t know _why_, okay? It’s not like I haven’t eaten more than enough already.”

“If you’re still feeling hungry, then you clearly haven’t eaten enough, though. Bodies are smart like that.”

“Bodies are _stupid _like that, Babe.”

“Well, I’m not gonna let you go without, okay? Especially not on your birthday.”

Keith pouts and almost makes Shiro believe that glimmer of uncertainty. “_Fine_,” he sighs. “‘s not like I can start a diet until tomorrow morning, anyway.”

“You _never_ need to start a diet, Baby. Not if it isn’t what you _really_ want to do.” Shiro gives Keith’s hand a squeeze as he gets his sneaker back on. “You’re perfect, okay? And you’re everything to me.”

Whether or not any of the people observing them believe it, Shiro wouldn’t lie about that. Neither would his character.

His character _would_ bring back another pair of plates, though. He’d stack them with even more food for Keith to plow through, and smile angelically at anyone who looks at him for too long. Without saying anything, Shiro tries to convey the idea that he doesn’t care about anyone else’s reactions, even though he does. (Not that it necessarily makes a difference to anyone else but Keith. As far as most people are concerned, Keith and Shiro can’t possibly care how anyone reacts to them because they relish in Keith getting bigger.)

As he sets the plates down in front of Keith, he nearly spills the sauce from the overly generous heap of enchiladas. Thankfully, he adjusts his wrist in time to prevent a mess—and better yet, to stop himself from losing any of the food that Keith likes so much. The enchiladas cover most of one plate, leaving barely any room for the Parmesan rosettes and slices of ham that Shiro shoved in—but Keith specifically _asked_ for the enchiladas. What kind of boyfriend would Shiro—or even just his character—be, if either of them ignored such a simple, easily honored request?

Slipping back into his seat, Shiro grins at the couple sitting across from him and Keith, but tries not to lose himself in trying to bait them, entice them to keep watching while Keith puts on a show.

Without words, he lets them know: _“Yes, my boyfriend is pretty chubby. Yes, he’ll be fat in no time, with the way he eats. Yes, I am knowingly encouraging him in this—because I love him, and I love his body, and don’t you only wish you had somebody who loves you this much.”_

Fortunately, Keith makes it easy for Shiro to focus on what really matters. He moans around a huge forkful of those enchiladas, making Shiro snap back to looking at him. Without missing a beat or letting himself slow down, he shovels the greasy, cheese-and-sauce-encrusted mix of tortilla and meat and peppers into his mouth as if racing against himself—which, in a sense, Keith kind of _is_. He only slows down so he can chew enough to swallow without choking. He only pauses in eating anything when he needs a sip of his cherry Coke.

Perching his chin on his palm, Shiro peers over at Keith’s belly. True, it’s probably rounder… The buttons _might_ be bowing out further than they have so far, stretching into wider curves as the swell of Keith’s ballooning midsection strains them to their limits, continually testing how much they can take from him and how much he can put them through…

All of which makes Shiro’s breath hitch in his throat—but it can’t hold a candle to the way Keith’s eating, the way that he has to _make himself_ keep going, the sheer force of will he’s summoned up to approach this task. Sure, Shiro _needs_ to appreciate the specifics—he can’t help soaking in the way Keith’s stomach increasingly looks like he swallowed a beach ball, how taut it looks when it spills onto his thighs, the way Keith’s cheeks puff out around each oversized bite of food that he sucks down—but the overall effect of them? The way? That makes Shiro’s cock twitch more than anything else.

Not that Keith takes time to soak up Shiro’s attention; he can’t afford that luxury right now, not with how much more he wants to eat. As he digs his way through the enchiladas, Keith’s breaths start coming to him shorter. Sharper. More gasping than anything. As gently as he can manage, Shiro nudges his foot up Keith’s leg again. Goes into his lap and kneads his toes against the yielding, squishy flesh of Keith’s thigh. It helps Keith breathe more steadily—at least, it seems to help—but this contact doesn’t do anything for the bright red flush that swamps onto Keith’s face. Wriggling in his seat, Keith can’t fight off the beads of sweat that spring up on his forehead.

Once Keith’s cleaned up that plate, he lets himself slump back in his seat. Struggling to take deep breaths proves hard for him: he winces in pain every time he inhales, and he groans with each breath that he lets out. He rests a hand on the fullest part of his middle, digs his fingers into the thick, tight mound of his stomach. This gets another belch out of him, and a series of breathy moans that makes a _need_ for Keith, a _need_ to be with him _right now_, flares up in Shiro’s chest. God, he’s _beautiful_, sprawling all over the seat and stuffed so full that it’s hurting him—and still eager for more, even if Keith isn’t saying so right now.

Keith could take care of himself without much trouble, if any. Sitting on the opposite side of the booth is no reason for Shiro to slack off on boyfriend duty, though. Neither is his birthday. Propping his cheek against his palm, Shiro can only see one option that he likes.

While Keith lets his head loll back and shuts his eyes, Shiro drags his foot further into Keith’s lap. He doesn’t linger on the pliant flesh of Keith’s thighs, but goes right for his stomach. Teasing his toes along the lower curve of Keith’s belly, where his chub remains soft even after how much he’s stuffed into himself already, Shiro smiles like he has no idea what he’s doing. At first, this gets a huff out of Keith—nothing too complicated or too harsh, just a sound of wry amusement—but he needs something more than this. He needs release, relief, and Shiro needs to give him that. As much as he can manage without breaking character or getting them thrown out.

So, Shiro hums innocently and presses into Keith’s stomach. He kneads his toes against that mound of overstuffed belly, jam-packed with food. Shiro doesn’t go in too hard yet. Enough to make Keith feel his intent, though. Definitely enough to make Keith wince—but that’s only fair. Underneath Shiro’s foot, Keith’s stomach resists, almost like it’s pushing back. Like he’s eaten so much that his body _wants_ to reject an offer of comfort from Shiro and wallow in the discomfort instead. Insistently working Keith over, Shiro tries not to force his midsection too much. Pushing too hard or in the wrong ways could easily make Keith sick instead of helping him through this.

For as gentle as he gets, though, he doesn’t compromise about rubbing Keith’s belly. Keith needs this, and Shiro needs to feel like he’s doing _something_ to help his boy. After a few soft belches—some muffled behind Keith’s hand, some sneaking up and out of him before he gets the chance to hide them—Keith reaches for his milkshake glass. Without missing a beat, he drains a good third of what’s there as if it’s nothing. Shiro has to conceal his own gasping, first at that and then again when Keith drags his next plate over.

“Can you go back up for me, Babe?” Twisting his fork through a clump of noodles and pesto, Keith huffs. “You’re spoiling me so much, I probably can’t start a diet until next _week_…”

Shiro shrugs. “If you’re sure, Baby.”

“Just one plate? Otherwise, I definitely won’t have room for dessert. And I _know_ you’re going to insist on that.”

“Damn right. Birthday boys get dessert, after all.”

Keith rolls his eyes in a way that most people would take as genuine exasperation. Even without the hint of fondness lurking underneath that expression, though, Shiro can tell that Keith is daring him to bring on some nebulous, questionably defined, _“it.”_

Keeping with the request, Shiro only brings back one plate, this time.

Straining the limits of what counts as, _“one,” _though, he chooses the biggest plate that he can find at the buffet. Then, he stacks it high with chicken wings, mashed potatoes, meatballs, mac and cheese, dumplings, and more fettuccine with pesto sauce. The food tries to spill as Shiro sets the new round of food down in front of Keith. As Shiro slips back into his seat, Keith can’t rein in his eyes. They’re trying to bug out of his head—and understandably, when his other plate is still about halfway full.

Backing down from a challenge isn’t like Keith, though. True to form, he doesn’t even consider it. He wolfs down everything left on the one plate at breakneck speed. Watching him, Shiro gets a rush like his head could detach from his neck and float away, spinning like a carnival ride. But Keith doesn’t let Shiro’s gawking slow him down. Doesn’t let anything hold him up. He drags the next plate over and goes right for the biggest chicken wing. He practically inhales the lot of them, dropping the bones in a heap on one of his used napkins. When the waitress brings a new refill for his cherry Coke, Shiro handles thanking her for it because Keith’s so absorbed in his dumplings that he doesn’t seem to notice.

After two decent scoops of his potatoes, Keith winces and covers his mouth. So red-faced that his cheeks almost match his shirt, he tries to keep breathing steadily, evenly. But he can’t calm his body down. Short, staccato breaths lead to a deep, rumbling belch that echoes throughout the restaurant. They can probably hear him in the kitchen and the parking lot, and some part of Shiro hopes that they can. Probably, it’s the same part of him that wants to lunge across the table, straddle Keith’s thighs, and kiss him until they forget what breathing feels like.

Except Keith tries to soldier on, heaping a spoonful of macaroni past his lips. He takes more time chewing it, and in the hopes of encouraging him, Shiro massages the fullest part of Keith’s belly with his toes. This gets him to sigh in relief, at first. Then, Shiro presses in harder, and he makes Keith belch again. Maybe not quite as loudly, but even with a hand over his mouth, Keith can’t stifle himself. Can’t dim the volume enough to keep this outburst from drawing attention.

While other patrons turn to stare at him, Keith cringes. Forces himself to inhale deeply, no matter how much this makes his face twist up with discomfort. His stomach pulls back, away from Shiro’s foot. He could drop it to the bench. But Shiro stays right where he is. Gasps softly as Keith’s belly surges back out and thwacks into him, all round and firm and heavy against his toes and the ball of his foot. Keith’s groaning drowns him out. As soon as he goes quiet, Keith digs back into his potatoes, ready to keep going. He barely lifts the spoon from his plate when—

_Rrrrriiiiip! Pop-pop-pop!_

Shiro’s breath hitches in his throat, hearing that sound he’s waited for. Hearing the _tink! tink! tink!_ of plastic smacking into metal.

As Keith groans, letting go of his spoon and slouching into the booth, Shiro slips down under the table. He gathers up three buttons that have gathered around the table’s support pole, and then he lingers.

Crouching down here is, at best, massively uncomfortable. Which makes sense, with him being too tall for the table. Even curling up, borderline-fetal positioned, Shiro’s shoulders skirt dangerously close to the bottom of the table. Pocketing them, he needs to tilt his head so he won’t knock it against the underside, with its mess of used gum and dirt. His body groans at him to move already, because it’s dirty down here and Shiro seriously does not need how sore this position might make him or how much his back might disagree with this life-choice.

God, though… Shiro can’t pass up this chance to stare at the work Keith’s done. Thanks to how he’s sitting, Shiro can see three buttons still attached to Keith’s shirt. Two rest above the hard, round swell of his stomach; the third is the bottom button that he couldn’t do up earlier. Stuffed so full, Keith’s paunch overflows the confines of both shirts. Now that he’s finally burst out of the top one, it falls open around his middle, each side shoved so far apart from the other that even sucking in with all his might couldn’t let Keith get them buttoned up again. Underneath that, his t-shirt rides up over his belly-button, wrinkling around the top-curve of his stomach and stretching around that overloaded gut, while the hem looks like it’s two steps off from ripping.

As much as Shiro’s back and shoulders want him to get out from under here already, the rest of him wants something else. He keeps himself hunched as he shuffles closer to Keith, as his hands lunge forward. Yes, they’re in public—but Keith’s belly is so crammed with food that his skin is turning red. Bulging so much that it covers a not-insignificant swath of thigh and refuses to let his shirt contain him. Besides, other patrons or the waitstaff would need to look for Shiro if they want to find him. He can’t stay long, but he has time enough to rub Keith’s tummy just a little bit. Give him enough relief that he’ll be able to finish up without hurting himself.

Warm to the touch, Keith’s stomach yields to his hands more easily than to his foot, but the firmness and resistance are still there. He still needs to put in effort as he works Keith over, digging in his fingertips and kneading at the hard, swollen ball that Keith’s made of his middle. Maybe someone else wouldn’t appreciate this chance, wouldn’t appreciate how much more they need to focus on Keith’s stomach—but Shiro fights to keep himself from inhaling too sharply.

It makes Shiro grin, the thought that Keith’s doing all of this _for him_. Yes, Keith enjoys this too—even if Keith _didn’t_ moan so nicely while Shiro massages his poor, straining belly—but tonight’s showing? It’s for Shiro, because Keith wants to give him something special for his birthday. As ever, Keith dazzles Shiro with the sheer amount of food that he can put away in one sitting, with how he can so easily make his already-chunky stomach even bigger, almost as if it’s nothing, and how shamelessly he belches as Shiro presses his palm into a spot that’s particularly taut. But the fact that Keith’s pushing himself so far tonight _because_ it makes Shiro happy, _because_ watching him pig out really turns Shiro on? That goes to Shiro’s head like he’s been shot full of aphrodisiacs and Novocaine.

Then, there’s Keith’s crotch. There’s the way he moans and twitches his hips as Shiro works him over. His stomach wobbles beneath Shiro’s hands, which only makes Keith whine. The reason why becomes apparent when Shiro palms at Keith’s straining fly. His girth already has the zipper and the fabric stretched to what ought to be their breaking point—and now, an erection presses against Keith’s jeans as well, no doubt aching and eager to break free. All because of how he’s eating and how much Shiro loves to watch him make such a piglet of himself.

Shiro’s breath hitches in his throat from simply thinking that. When he drags himself back up into his seat, his head feels dizzier than a drunk frat boy stumbling off a tilt-a-whirl. Blinking down at Keith’s plates, he can’t help gasping. Shiro didn’t _think_ he was on the floor too terribly long, but all that Keith has left is a trio of meatballs and a clump of pesto-covered noodles.

“Oh. My _God_,” Shiro whimpers behind his hand.

“I _know_, right?”

Keith’s drawl could better conceal what they’re really playing at. Could sound more like he’s ashamed and less like he’s hearing Shiro’s praise for what it is. But none of the patrons who stare their way look confused, and as he pops a meatball past his greedy lips, Keith doesn’t seem like he cares to notice. Not at the moment, anyway. Right now, all he cares to do is ask for Shiro to hit the dessert buffet for him, fluttering his long, thick eyelashes and cooing about how he might as well give in, tonight.

“Sure, there’s the birthday boy special dessert coming? Once I pick it out?” Keith jostles his belly, wincing slightly from the motion. “But you’re right about what day it is, Babe. Besides, I should get a last hurrah in, right? Before I get serious about slimming down for you?”

At best, Shiro’s agreement is noncommittal. “D’you want treats from the dessert bar, first? Or should I hit the sundae bar, instead?”

Pressing on his burgeoning stomach, Keith sighs. “Go for the dessert bar, first. I need to pick out what I want for my special treat, and I really shouldn’t? But it’ll be easier to eat ice cream later, right?” Blushing bright pink, he muffles a belch behind his hand. “…Yeah, definitely go for the dessert bar, first.”

Shiro nods; he doesn’t need to be told twice. When he slinks back to his seat, he’s loaded up two plates with frosted brownies, two good-sized chocolate cupcakes with cherry frosting, two huge slices of double-chocolate Devil’s Food cake (each covered in heaping globs of whipped cream), a bigger slice of cherry-chocolate cheesecake (on which Shiro’s drawn a heart with a gleaming trail of cherry drizzle), a somewhat smaller slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie (Shiro can admit: he’s mostly living vicariously by bringing that to Keith because he’s the one who loves his strawberries, and he doesn’t feel up to eating it himself, right now), and a modest cinnamon roll. The waitress hasn’t brought Keith’s special treat yet, but he’s only just put the order in.

“_Babe_,” Keith breathes out, letting his belly surge forward even further. “I know I’m hungry, and I know you want to spoil me—”

“I got it all so we’d need fewer repeat trips.” Slipping his foot up into Keith’s lap again, Shiro can’t help beaming with pride and love. “I’m only going back up there if you specifically ask me for that, Baby.”

Dropping character and unwrapping his first cupcake, Keith hisses, “Don’t see that happening. Even I have limits, Kashi.”

“I know. And you’re doing so well, okay?” He rubs his foot along Keith’s thigh, gently nudges his toes against Keith’s crotch. Keith moans, then again when he chomps into his cupcake—and undeterred, Shiro kneads at Keith’s erection. “Finish everything like the star you are? And I’ll make it very worth your while.”

“It already is, dumbass.” Keith scarfs down the rest of the cupcake before explaining, “Getting blown, or fucked, or ridden when we get home tonight? Would just be whipped cream and a cherry after the real main event.”

Shiro inhales sharply, grinning from that idea. “Keep eating before your belly decides you’re out of room.”

That’s all Keith needs to get them back on track. He’s an artist, with the way he goes at the daunting, enormous, richly calorie-laden task in front of them. Here, he practically inhales his first slice of Devil’s Food cake, tearing through it before Shiro fully registers which treat Keith’s going for. There, he shoves an entire brownie into his mouth at once, then washes it down with his last remaining swig of milkshake.

Throughout it all, Keith moans and gasps sporadically. Sweat doesn’t only line his forehead, but damp stains start forming underneath his arms as well. He has to fight to keep his breathing even remotely steady, inhaling as deeply as he can without compromising on his eating speed. It makes Shiro tremble with wanting, and he has to choke down a whimper at the way Keith gets so caught up in plowing through his food as quickly as he can that he smudges cake and frosting all around his lips. When Keith pauses to lick the corners of his mouth, Shiro’s toes curl up and he can’t fight off the impulse to rub his foot against Keith’s crotch.

True, finding this so head-spinningly hot, Shiro has every selfish reason to pay attention. As Keith presses on, though, Shiro makes himself focus for his Baby’s sake, besides. Periodically, he presses his foot against Keith’s belly, works his toes along the spots where Keith’s gotten so full and round, where his stomach sure feels like it has the most food crammed in. This doesn’t always help Keith with his breathing—sometimes, he belches, but more often, he winces and groans, his noises a mix of pleasure, pain, and above all else, relief—but he nods when Shiro lowers his voice to ask if Keith wants him to keep going.

He’s scraping crumbs off the first plate when the waitress brings over the treat Keith ordered off the list of birthday specials: a decently-sized bowl, carrying an enormous, gooey-looking brownie with six huge scoops of ice cream (two each of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry). Whipped cream teeters on top of the concoction, with chocolate fudge and strawberry topping drizzled in as well. Keith likely could’ve ordered something bigger, but God, that sundae isn’t anything to scoff at. The worst part of anything is how the waitstaff makes Keith endure a birthday song before he can get back to eating.

“I _am_ trying my best about this problem with my waistline.” As soon as the waitstaff have dispersed, Keith allows himself to whine. He pouts as though he means it, even as he. “I know it doesn’t look like I’m making an effort? How could it, when I’m stuffed to the brim and destroying my poor clothes, like with my shirt? But I swear, I’m doing everything that I can think of to get skinny again, Babe—”

“Why do you even want to bother, though?” Shiro hums as though he’s considering something. As if there’s anything about this to give that kind of thought. “Baby, you’re always so stressed… But you look so happy, when you let yourself enjoy your comfort food—”

“But look at what it’s _done_ to me,” Keith bites out through a mouthful of ice cream and brownie. He digs through another three spoonfuls, _Looking_ at Shiro like he expects some kind of argument. Unfortunately for him, words don’t want to come to Shiro—so, Keith has to tell him, “It’s not like I can hide this enormous freaking _gut_ I’ve gotten, Babe. It’s not a mysterious laundry accident, okay? And it’s not ten pounds that I could lose as easily as breathing, if I really put my mind to it. It’s not like I got a little pudgy over Christmas and need to get back to the gym—though I _do_ need to do that. _Fuck_, I should have done that_ months_ ago—”

“Not if you don’t want to be there.” Shiro shrugs. He hopes his smile is as besotted as he feels and as goopy as Keith’s brownie. “But if you really want to come work out again? You know I’ll help you out, Baby. Any way I can.”

“Could you try admitting that I’m getting _fat_?” Keith’s face screws up, but Shiro can’t tell if it’s from pain or the façade of pleading. He wriggles, knocking his belly into Shiro’s foot. Inhales deeply, lets out a sigh. Rinse, lather, repeat, and then tacks on, “I know you want to spare my feelings, Kashi, and I appreciate that, okay? I do. But just because I’ve gotten this far into dinner and haven’t ripped apart my jeans? That doesn’t prove that I’m not getting—”

A loud _rrrrrrrip!_ cuts Keith off, blasting through the restaurant.

Below the table, something metallic smacks against the table’s support pole with a _clang! _and hits the floor with a _tink-tink-tink!_

As a throng of nameless patrons turn to gawk, Keith groans in bone-deep relief, slouching in his side of the booth. When Shiro leans across the table to see the progress, he can’t help gasping. Without the button holding things in place, Keith’s belly surges out and rends clear through its confines. The zipper doesn’t simply come undone; the engorged, swollen mass around Keith’s midsection tears it off the denim with the loudest _rrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiip! _that Keith’s come up with tonight. Once that inconvenient fixture’s out of his way, Keith’s gut spills out, crunching the waistband and the sides of his fly underneath its firm, prodigious girth.

God, even if he hadn’t torn them apart and lost the button, Keith wouldn’t have a single hope of getting those jeans done up, not with as round and stuffed as he is, now. Not with the underside of his belly protruding out so far into his lap, it finds crotch and no doubt rubs his cock in a way that Shiro would envy, if he weren’t going to dote on Keith’s poor stuffed belly when they get home, going to clean him up and take care of him until they fall asleep beside each other.

Panting, trying to calm his breathing down again, Keith lets a victorious grin light up his chubby face. His cheeks flush stoplight red again, but so many factors feed into this that Shiro can’t pick a single one to blame. He isn’t sure it matters, either, not when Keith looks so gorgeous.

Either way, losing that button works like magic: Keith tears through the rest of his desserts with reckless, gluttonous abandon, practically inhaling those luscious sweets with their unfathomable calorie counts, pausing only to collect melted ice cream or scrape crumbs off his second plate. Once he’s finished, Shiro hates to leave him alone—but he has to head up to the counter and pay their tab. The sooner he does that, the sooner they get home.

“I might need some help,” Keith sighs as soon as Shiro gets back to their booth.

“You did so well, Baby? You can have all the help you need.”

But holding a hand out for him to take it? Only makes Keith scoff. Whining softly, he holds both arms out toward Shiro and grabs at the thin air between them.

Shiro doesn’t need to be told twice; he just needs a sec to throw on his jacket and nudge the table closer to his side of the booth. Then, with a deep breath, he worms one arm behind Keith’s back, slips the other underneath Keith’s knees, and heaves with all he’s got, trying to lift Keith up without upsetting his bulging stomach. Sure, Keith winces, but as he leans into Shiro’s chest, he kisses at Shiro’s neck, grazing that playful smirk along his skin.

“Almost thought I’d _never_ get my jeans off,” he hisses, nuzzling at Shiro’s shoulder.

“I knew you would, eventually. I mean, yeah, with everything you put away, I’m shocked that they held out on you so long?” As he gets them out into the freezing night, Shiro kisses at Keith’s flushed, sweat-damp forehead. “But I know better than to dream of giving up on you.”

***** ***** *****

If the world ever went according to plan, then Shiro would blow Keith as soon as they get back to his room.

Instead, they’re barely halfway home when Keith’s needy gasps and groans give way to whining. Drowning out the radio DJ without trying, he whimpers. Twitches his hips and jostles his belly, and while they’re held up at a red light, Shiro gets a pretty good idea why. There’s no way that Keith is rubbing his gut against his crotch by accident. If he were successfully coming in his pants, then this effort would be worth it. But as Keith carries on, he gives up more frustrated grunting than moaning or sighing as his orgasm builds.

At the next red light, Keith tugs on Shiro’s jacket. “_Please_,” he bites out without explaining what he means. “Shiro, seriously, I can’t wait, okay? Just… Pull over and help me? _Please_?”

Shiro answers with a nod and fortunately, he finds a place before too long.

The back rows of a mostly-empty Macy’s parking lot might not be the pinnacle of romance, but it’s here for them right now. Beneath a street-lamp’s frosty halo of light, Shiro gets out and crouches beside Keith. He eases the passenger seat back as far as it goes, gets Keith all splayed out for him, with his cock straining his boxer-briefs almost as much as Keith’s bulging stomach strains against his t-shirt. Shiro’s careful about getting Keith’s underwear out of the way, but he wastes no time. His Baby wouldn’t ask for this unless it was really necessary, unless he were well and truly ready to burst.

Maybe Shiro’s not as artful as he could be, licking up Keith’s shaft and taking Keith into his mouth. He prefers to put more time and effort in, when he has the chance. But Shiro doesn’t want to make Keith suffer, and Keith _groans so nicely _as Shiro works his lips up and down his hot, aching cock. Here, he sucks and twists his fingers around Keith’s dick. A flick of the tongue, there. Going at this task as if he’s suffocating and Keith’s dick is his life-support. All the while, he keeps at least one hand on Keith’s stomach, not kneading that poor, swollen mound of belly as much as he could, but groping idly at anything his fingers find.

Sometimes, Keith’s hips twitch, driving his cock deeper into Shiro’s mouth—but it’s mostly unintentional, a reaction that Keith can’t help. He’d likely do it on his own, if he were in that state of mind. He’d try to find a rhythm that matches Shiro’s and works with him on chasing the release Keith needs. But as it stands, he’s too blissed out for that kind of effort.

“_Jesus_, Shiro,” Keith gasps, over the opening chords of that new Fall Out Boy song he likes so much. “Fuck, ‘m so close—”

He cuts himself off with a moan, but not because he’s coming. Instead, Shiro presses into Keith’s stomach. Not hard enough to hurt him, but hard enough to complement the way that Shiro jerks Keith’s cock. He works Keith over more quickly, sucking and licking and finally—

“_Oh_,” Keith gasps, hips bucking and belly shaking as he spills in Shiro’s mouth.

Dimly, as he swallows and checks his lips for any residue, Shiro picks out the sound of Pete Wentz belting, _“I’m here in search of your glory! There’s been a million before me! That ultra kind of love you never walk away from!”_

“You’re just the last of the real ones,” Keith sighs, mussing his hand over Shiro’s hair. “Also, amazing. Fuck, Shiro, you really are.”


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A wild bottom!Shiro chapter appears, feat. rough body play, and self-humiliating, kink-pandering dirty talk.

_“Make You Feel My Chub.” Akira’s anxious about how chunky he’s been getting lately, but Sable doesn’t believe that he’s put on any weight at all. Not that Akira doesn’t appreciate how sweet his boyfriend is—but Sable just won’t listen about the effects that all his spoiling have had on his once-slim waistline. Poor Akira’s old summer clothes don’t fit him anymore, and Sable still insists that he doesn’t see the chub that’s been growing right in front of him. Can Akira do anything to make Sable see the big, fat, painfully obvious truth? Features belly-play, panties, humiliation-flavored fat-talk, grinding, some belly-fucking, and some slight rough body play (Sable on bottom)._

* * *

It’s a good ten days between Shiro’s birthday and the next clip that he and Keith have a chance to shoot. At that, Keith mostly drags Shiro away from grant-writing crunch-time because they got another commission. Whoever sent it, they’ve paid good money, doubling Keith’s usual price so they can move up the priority list. To hear Keith tell it, the commissioner might tip them nicely _and _they gave Keith permission to post the clip on his storefront. Moreover, he only needs to wait three days after sending off the final edit.

Aside from a few scattered ideas, some favorites Keith’s usual repertoire—tight clothes, some play with size differences and physical contrasts perhaps, button-popping if Keith can swing it but it’s fine if he can’t—they only included one specific request. Namely: “Akira” needs to fuck “Sable,” preferably while literally on top of him.

Keith and Shiro have come up with a good story to fit that prompt, and it starts with Shiro already on Keith’s bed. Kicked back against the headboard, poking at his phone, Shiro’s meant to pretend that he’s in his own room. They’d use that for a backdrop if they could, but Shiro has too many copyrighted images hanging on his walls and ceiling. There’s only so much they could cover up with an old black bed-sheet, like the one that he pinned to Keith’s wall while setting up the cameras earlier, making sure to get his Dolly Parton posters covered. When they tried to scope things out yesterday, Shiro’s posters kept sneaking into the shots, and taking them down would take more time than he and Keith want to waste when there’s a commissioner waiting.

Yet, as Shiro crosses one leg over the other and frowns at Lotor’s latest text, all he can think is that Keith’s subscribers already know this room as “Akira’s.” No matter what Lotor tells him about Stanislavski method this, and Uta Hagen that, and, _“Darling, honestly, Stella Adler’s work on acting is not that complicated. Simply clear your mind, focus, and remember the anecdote about Marlon Brando pretending to be a chicken,” _something about this feels so far beyond Shiro’s capabilities that it’s functionally impossible.

Hell, he can barely focus on rereading Lotor’s advice, not when his brain keeps wandering back to the prep job Shiro did on himself. Did he use enough lube? Given how much foreplay’s on the docket and how that’s meant to be the clip’s main draw, Shiro had to break out the silicone-based stuff—it’s gonna suck to wash out of his boxer-briefs and sheets, but thank God’s lucky stars that they actually had any without running to the Good Vibrations down in Brookline—but what if they take too long? Keith can’t just plow right into him, when they get that far, but would it be awkward for Keith to get the bottle out of his nightstand? If they were only sleeping together for fun, it wouldn’t matter, but now, they’ve gotta please the client who commissioned them, which complicates _everything_.

If slicking Shiro up with extra lube _did_ slow things down too much, then could Shiro edit around that without making their clip look more amateurish and stilted? Considering how their shoots usually go, Shiro’s already gonna have enough of a challenge, trying to pick the best views of Keith’s body and trying to hide the fumbling that comes with improvisation. Does that mean editing around the potential clumsiness wouldn’t make much difference, or would Shiro crumble under the additional stressor? Or could Keith take him without all this pointless hand-wringing? No, Shiro hasn’t gotten fucked in ages, and yes, Keith’s cock is impressively thick—but he knows what he’s doing with it (Shiro trusts), so maybe Keith could cut to the action without needing extra assistance? Did Shiro even _use enough lube_ in the first place—

Thankfully, a loud, exasperated groan cuts in on Shiro’s reverie. The helter skelter onslaught of worry disappears as something in Shiro’s mind flares up, white-hot. At the sharp crack on the door-frame, his head snaps up.

How he keeps himself from gasping at the sight of his boyfriend, Shiro doesn’t know. Even though it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before, Keith’s body never fails to make longing flare up deep in the pit of Shiro’s chest. He half-expects a Hanahaki chill to hit him as he traces his eyes over Keith’s bulging tummy and the roll of soft pudge that sags over his pants, both up front and on the sides, where he looks ever-so-slightly thicker than Shiro remembers. Part of him wishes that Keith had a shirt on—wishes that he could see the fabric stretching so much around Keith’s middle that he could split it open or rip a seam at any moment—but on the other hand, it might be for the best. Teasing like that could make Shiro’s knees give out while he loses any semblance of consciousness.

Small mercy: Shiro doesn’t faint. He also doesn’t hack up any red azaleas. Maybe he’s worrying too much about that possibility. He’s into his third week without coughing. Pretty soon, he’ll be in the clear.

Apparently, he’s well enough to withstand the sight of Keith’s chunky stomach and love-handles blooming out, spilling over the confines of his shorts, straining against his seams, and crushing the waistband underneath that pale, stretch-marked bulk.

That fact becomes all the more impressive when Shiro spots Keith’s button, still free from its hole, and the triangle-shaped swath of skin and underwear exposed by his half-open zipper. The dark fabric is all but outright painted on Keith’s body, clinging to the rolls of his stomach, struggling around and chafing against Keith’s paunch. Hell, he’d have _more_ wiggle room with body paint because at least then, he wouldn’t need to argue with shorts that don’t have enough fabric to contain him anymore.

Getting the fly done up might constitute a miracle, if Keith can pull it off. Getting the shorts all the way up to his waist could fit on a resumé if Keith wanted to apply at NASA. God, with the way his thighs curve out, making the stretchy denim wrinkle and crumple up, it’s a wonder that he hasn’t yet ripped them to shreds. Shiro salivates as he combs his eyes over Keith’s luscious, wobbling flesh, spilling out of his bottoms and making them look even shorter than they are—

“_Sable_,” Keith huffs, thundering toward the black duct tape _‘X’_ on the floor that marks where he needs to stand.

Folding his arms over his chest, he pushes his increasingly plush pecs out at Shiro, emphasizes how soft his chest is getting lately, how much cushion he’s gained, even though he remains more bottom-heavy. The whole-body slump that Keith slips into makes him look extra-pouty and makes his stomach look extra-large. The loud cough to clear his throat is the only reason Keith doesn’t lose Shiro to gawking at that gorgeous mass of flesh.

“We need to talk about this, Sable.”

“About what?” Feeling as mentally thick as his character’s meant to feel, Shiro shunts his phone onto the bedside table. Rolls his shoulders. Shakes his head while Keith gestures at his ample midsection, because—“It’s not my birthday, so…? Is there something fun coming up, Baby? Something you need to look cute for? More cuter than usual, I mean?”

Keith snorts, and Shiro struggles to keep from cringing. Yeah. _“More cuter.” _Jesus, what the Hell is wrong with him? Aside from the obvious fact that Keith is beautiful and Shiro is a complete disaster, which isn’t news and so it shouldn’t count.

Quirking his shoulders, Shiro tries again, “If you’re fishing for compliments, just let me know? I’m always happy to tell you how—”

“_No_! It’s not like that. I’ve just been trying on those summer clothes that you washed up for me—”

“Oh, yeah? Well, you look great, Baby. Very sexy.” To drive the point home better, Shiro gives Keith a warm, fond smile. “I love those shorts on you. Like, you really do look like the best birthday present a guy could ever ask for.”

“I look _great_,” Keith parrots incredulously. “Very _sexy_?” He shakes his head. “Are you _joking_?”

Furrowing his brow, Shiro insists, “Why would I joke with you about how good you look?”

“I’m practically bursting _out_ of this outfit, Sable!” Flushing scarlet really sells the indignation. So does the way Keith stomps on the floor. Yet, instead of minding the conversation like he should, Shiro can’t help staring at the way Keith’s belly jiggles, how the impact from his movements ripples through his pudge. “Come on, you aren’t an idiot. I look _ridiculous_!”

“Okay, sure. If by, ‘ridiculous,’ you mean, ‘completely beautiful’—”

“In what universe? _Which _reality?”

“In _all _universes, Akira. Why is that even a question? Are you seriously…”

Maybe Shiro shouldn’t move. Maybe he should stay put against the headboard. Maybe he should keep his hands to himself and shouldn’t shuffle around to the middle of Keith’s mattress like he means to head right to his Baby’s side.

But Lotor told Shiro to trust his instincts more readily, to let the spirit of the scene move him where it will—and right now, he feels moved to be near Keith. Kneeling, trying not to muss up the sheets too much, Shiro slouches at the hips and pulls his abs in tight, even though the camera currently can’t see them. Folding his hands up between his thighs, he screws his face up into the softest pleading expression that he can summon.

“Baby, come on,” he faux-whispers. “You’re always beautiful. You _know_ I believe that—”

Keith wrinkles his nose. “Would I still be beautiful if I lost weight?”

“Of course you would. _Any_ shape or size you are, Baby. I love you, and I’ll always think you’re gorgeous. The prettiest I’ve ever seen.”

Flipping his bangs back off his face, Keith huffs. “Fine, then. I’m slimming down again. Going on a diet. Starting now.”

“Wait, what?” Worrying his fingertips against the backs of his hands, Shiro gulps. “Excuse me?”

Eyes glittering with something wicked, Keith lets his lips curl up into a smirk so cold, it must’ve crawled out of a meat locker. “You… Oh, my God. You really think you’re being slick right now. Don’t you, Sable? That’s… It’s so cute. _Almost_ adorable.”

“Th-thank you?” Simply hearing himself, Shiro ducks his chin. His cheeks flood with warmth and part of him wants to run screaming before he humiliates both of them in ways they definitely won’t enjoy—never mind giving himself the chance to ruin the scene, all of Lotor’s acting advice be damned. “I just? Akira, I don’t see what you’re talking about—or whatever you _think _you’re talking about—”

“I _barely_ squeezed into these shorts. I _haven’t_ gotten them done up yet, and honestly, I think I _won’t_…”

A deep inhale leads to a heavy sigh—and to Keith’s stomach bumping out against his fly, surging forward like it means to crash right through the denim. The zipper holds it back for now, but not without trembling from the effort that this takes. Keith pooches so his belly protrudes even further, and he pops his tongue when he catches Shiro staring. Squeezing that warm, inviting mound of flesh, Keith arches his eyebrows as if daring Shiro to put up or shut up, to prove that he’s telling truths or else stop talking and let himself reach out, take hold of Keith’s belly for himself, and sink his fingers into every inch of Keith’s body.

For all he _knows_ what he wants, Shiro holds his breath and shakes his head. That’s what feels right for the scene, he guesses. If he’s not allowed to touch Keith yet because Sable would exercise more self-control than Shiro wants, that is.

“Yeah _right_, Sable,” Keith sneers, petulantly wrinkling his nose. “You _really_ have no idea what I mean, huh?”

Another shake of the head makes Keith laugh like ice cubes clinking as a blender starts tearing through them. Fixing Shiro with a cool gaze, he ghosts his hands over the filled-out curves of his hips. Gently sinks his palms into the plush swell of flab he’s added to his frame while getting chubby. Teases like he might push his belly toward Shiro—like he might torment Shiro by making his pudge look that much softer, that much more enticing, that much more in need of Shiro touching Keith all over and rubbing that plump tummy, those growing love-handles, those beautiful, chunky thighs—but ultimately, Keith only drags his hands around his body, only presses them in enough to let Shiro know what he’s missing out on.

Shiro bites the inside of his cheek to keep himself from gasping too much at the way Keith’s belly moves, wobbling from side to side, each time Keith shifts on his feet. While the longing threatens to burst out of him more than Keith’s stomach threatens the structural integrity of his shorts, Shiro chews on his lip in the hopes that it will shove his pent-up keening down to the pit of his chest where it belongs, muffle all the yearning sighs that he can feel brewing inside of him. Repressing all of his own reactions, fighting to keep his face as neutral as possible and _not_ betray his lust, how much he wants Keith _now_? Shiro’s entire body aches.

Sure, his body’s disapproval could be worse. Powering through nasty junk food cravings, the kind that crop up out of nowhere, when Shiro isn’t really hungry but he hasn’t dealt with something else that’s bugging him? That sends more pain shocking and writhing through Shiro than this, even after how much time and effort he’s put into learning how to handle them and learning how to do better by himself.

Even so, as Keith cups his fingers around the lower curve of his belly, Shiro’s lungs feel like they’ll twist out of his chest, if things keep going on like this between himself and Keith. If Shiro has to wait for too long while Keith caresses his own chub, squishing it between his palms, jutting it out at Shiro, and giving the swell of flesh a good, firm jostle? If Shiro has to keep his hands down and laced up tightly with each other—burying them in his lap with a grip so fierce that his knuckles shiver and he only hopes that it doesn’t show on camera—forcing himself to stay quiet while Keith sends tremors wobbling through his entire midsection, including his heavenly, grabbable chest (which looks desperately in need of Shiro’s hickeys)? If Shiro has to keep behaving and doesn’t ever get the outlet of touching Keith, much less anything else?

God, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Scream, probably. That’s the only thing that Shiro’s brain gives him as Keith slaps the side of his stomach and Shiro grasps desperately for anything he can think of, since his words aren’t working properly.

Shaking his head doesn’t rattle any mental wires back into place. But however vacant he feels, Shiro’s mouth manages to splutter, “I don’t see it, Baby. I really don’t. If you think your shorts are too tight, then I kinda need to wonder—”

“If I _think_ my shorts are too tight? Why do I need to _think_ when it’s completely obvious?”

“When _what’s_ completely obvious? How you’re getting insecure over issues that aren’t real?”

When Shiro quirks his shoulders again, Keith barks out a laugh. Crossing the short distance to his next mark, he swishes his hips. Doesn’t need to do that, but God, Shiro won’t argue, if Keith wants to show off how this makes his belly sway.

Chub bulges all over Keith’s body, lining every inch of him with such alluring, tempting softness, sitting right there and begging Shiro to reach out and sink his fingertips in until he finds where Keith’s buried any of his old muscle. Whatever traces of his old physique might yet remain, with how much he’s let himself go, they’re surely so well-hidden that Shiro couldn’t dig them up without working Keith’s chub over for at least an hour. Another dull smack collides with Keith’s tummy and makes his pudge shake like no one’s business, like Keith _wants _to torture Shiro with how he can look but he can’t touch until Keith decides to allow him that reward.

“Can you see it _yet_, Babe?” Keith’s eyebrows arch as if there’s only one right answer to that question—but the way he squeezes his stomach makes all of Shiro’s thoughts evaporate. “You can’t have missed the way that I’ve been pigging out, lately—”

“Who said that? Seriously, who even said that to you. What is there _problem_, Baby? I’ll fight them. If you’re hungry, you should—”

“Should try to rein myself in before I chug a gallon of freaking milkshake. As if I _need_ any more sugar and fat and calories.”

“Baby, I…” Trailing off, Shiro swallows thickly. Hopes he can keep it together enough to stay on-task. Prays that he can keep himself from blurting out anything about how hot it would be to watch Keith chug down calories like that and how they could totally go do that, when they’re done with this shoot. He yanks a hand back through his bangs with a sigh, and wilts onto the mattress, propping himself up on one palm. “All I can see is _you_, okay? And you’re so beautiful. Nothing will change that, even a diet—”

“How can you _not. see._ this?” Keith shakes his head and jostles his belly with both hands. “Like, Jesus, Sable. I should’ve gotten on a diet _months_ ago. When I first noticed that my jeans were getting tighter. I never should’ve waited for a second.”

They’re going in circles. Or that’s what it feels like. Keith won’t budge about all the weight that he’s put on—won’t compromise in the task of making his boyfriend stop equivocating on the subject—but if Shiro grabs him now, then he’ll ruin the shoot. No matter how much he wants to touch Keith, Sable doesn’t have a _reason_ to grab Akira—not based on the most recent dialogue. Not when Keith’s planted himself with no visible intent to move; he won’t even shift his hands around on his stomach, won’t touch his hips or sink his fingers into his chub.

Swallowing thickly, Shiro burns with the need to do _something_, to figure out _anything_ that can drag them onto the track that gets them moving in the right direction, that gets this scene headed toward where it needs to be, with Shiro’s hands all over Keith and Keith’s weight all bearing down on Shiro’s hips, all he needs is a spark and—

“Why don’t you show me, Baby?”

Keith squints, frowns, twitches his nose. “Excuse me?”

“Why don’t you come show me what you’re talking about?” Shiro inhales deeply, and something twists hard inside his chest—Jesus, he needs to touch Keith. “You’re going on about how much weight you’ve gained, how much bigger you think you’ve gotten—”

“There’s nothing to _think_ about this, okay? It’s plainly fucking obvious—”

“I disagree—”

“Yeah, you’ve made that more obvious than how chunky I’m getting—”

“There’s nothing for you to act like this about—”

“Well, I say there’s no sense in _you_ acting like I’ve done anything but _pork_ out, and stuff my face, and let myself get _fat_—”

“So _prove_ it.”

Although he scoots back on the comforter, Shiro leans toward Keith, arching his back and letting his legs fall open in a way he hopes looks extra-slutty. Judging from the next little shock of pain, Shiro couldn’t have done this before he left for California. Hell, he might not have managed this so well, even just a few months ago. Bending his knees helps ease him into it, as does resting his heels on the bed, but Shiro’s _worked_ for this flexibility, and God, he prays Keith likes it, likes literally anything about how Shiro’s spreading for him.

As he snakes around in his seat, working out his back, Shiro edges into one camera’s line of sight, the one that should get close-up shots of their faces, as long as he’s hit the right mark. His lungs kick back with another twinge when Keith puts his hands on his hips, lets them sink in just enough to torment Shiro the the thought of how soft his body’s gotten—but it’s no matter. Nothing goes cold. Therefore, it’s nothing like the Hanahaki pain. So, totally not worth getting worried. Trying not to let it show on his face—and trying not to give away how much he _wants_ this—Shiro pouts up and pats the swath of mattress between his muscular thighs.

He expects Keith to take him up on that bet, swoop down on him, and knock him back. Forcing himself not to grin, Shiro braces himself. He’ll want to go down hard, but he can’t let the fall take him out completely, not while they have work to do.

Instead, Keith waits by the edge of the mattress. He cocks one hip and pooches, making his stomach droop over to his left. Yet, he roots himself to the floor like he might never move. Might never close the distance between them. Might never let Shiro touch him—and like he might be the world’s biggest sadist, stretching his arms over his head as he pulls himself up to his full height and shaking out every inch of chub. Shiro doesn’t notice how much Keith’s sucked in until he’s fumbling around the rolls of his stomach, jostling them while ostensibly digging for his waistband. Watching Keith tug the button toward its hole, Shiro holds his breath; he only exhales when Keith gets his shorts done up.

Which only lasts until Keith sighs. Letting that out sends his stomach surging forward, back to its full glory. The button pops off with a _rrrrip!_ and clatters to the floor. Even though his own black boxer-briefs and t-shirt remain perfectly intact, Shiro can’t help the blush that swamps onto his cheeks. Everything feels hot and muggy as he peers down at the floor, looking for wherever the button landed.

But a chill shocks through him again as the mattress starts to sag. A quickly shifted glance, and Shiro blinks down at a pale thigh, big and soft and kneeling right between his legs. As cold snakes through him—twisting through his veins, writhing in his muscles, almost curling up in the pit of his lungs—warm, pudgy fingers catch him by the chin.

Easing Shiro’s gaze back up, gently holding him in-place, Keith _tsk_’s at him. His smirk knows something that he must think Shiro doesn’t. His eyes glimmer dangerously, and Shiro would grab those pudgy cheeks and kiss Keith breathless, if he could break Keith’s spell and remember how to move his arms. Seems that they’d prefer to remain unhelpful, though. All they do is tremble as if all the effort Shiro’s put into building them up means nothing and they could give way beneath him at any moment.

With a low chuckle, Keith nudges Shiro’s right leg down onto the mattress—_dammit, the angles, of course, so stupid of me_—and presses one knuckle against Shiro’s Adam’s apple. Not hard enough to hurt—barely even hard enough to let Shiro know what he could do, were either of them so inclined—but Shiro pushes back into the contact, edges his throat into Keith’s touch. He makes his own breath hitch, doing that. Regardless, Shiro locks gazes with Keith as he rubs his neck against Keith’s hand.

All Keith does, at first, is snicker. “Oh, _now_ you’ve got nothing to say, Pretty Boy?”

Tilting his head, Keith teases his lips along Shiro’s cheek. They’re so lucky for the extra cameras they’ve set up; Keith makes Shiro shudder and makes his eyes flutter closed, all by virtue of his one hand squeezing Shiro’s thigh and his humid breaths on Shiro’s skin. A close-up of this moment could be a high-point of this clip, even when it barely counts as _kinky_. Not unless someone out there particularly gets off on watching Keith edge into Shiro’s personal space and trace his lips all over Shiro’s high, well-angled cheekbones and the sharp cut of his jawline.

As if Keith can tell that Shiro’s getting too far wrapped up in his own mind, he digs his nails into the muscle of Shiro’s thigh, worries his knuckle into Shiro’s windpipe, hard enough to make it known that _this_ is where Shiro’s thoughts belong. Right here, with Keith, in his room and his bed. Nowhere else.

“Absolutely no words from you about _any_ of this?” Tutting, Keith slips his fingers off of Shiro’s neck. He pulls away; the mattress makes a sound like sighing in relief, and he thumps his foot into the floor. “Or are you just not gonna admit that you were wrong?”

Whatever Keith’s doing, he grunts. The floorboards groan, like he’s shuffling and maybe putting too much weight into it.

Thickly, Shiro tells him, “You’re so beautiful.”

“You aren’t even _looking_ at me, you little liar.”

“I’d never lie about that, Baby…”

Keith clicks his tongue, not disapprovingly, but like a snap of the fingers to call Shiro back into his right mind, or something more adjacent to it. Leaning back feels right. Not like what Keith wants, most likely, but it gives him more room, if he wants to come back, if he wants to get all the way into Shiro’s space.

Digging a hand into Shiro’s thigh, Keith pushes Shiro’s one leg down to match the other one. The mattress dips and creaks; Keith must’ve climbed all the way on. Just the thought of that sends a burst of heat through Shiro. His fingers grab at the comforter as Keith shifts the entire mattress beneath them. His fist balls up so tightly that his whole arm quivers. Unruffled, or perhaps not noticing, Keith straddles his lap and smushes his thighs on Shiro’s. His breath sticks in his throat like a dry-swallowed pill; Shiro only catches an inhale when Keith slithers against him, stomach wobbling against Shiro’s abs.

Ever intent on tormenting him, on dragging this out and playing up whatever he can because being Shiro’s boyfriend gives him that right, Keith refuses to crowd in, the way that Shiro wants. Ghostly-light in the way he moves on Shiro, Keith only allows Shiro a taste of all his weight, only squishes on Shiro enough to needle him with the idea of how much more Keith could do. His plump ass bears down on Shiro’s lap without letting him feel everything, and the lower curve of his belly teases its way along Shiro’s crotch, but. Still, he’s close enough now. Brushing his hands up Keith’s legs, Shiro finds warm skin, bare until he gets to Keith’s hips and his fingers trip into something lacy.

Shiro’s eyes snap open at that discovery. He frowns bemusedly, nose scrunching up as he searches Keith’s face for an explanation. Wearing a fond smirk, Keith leans in as if he might give up a kiss—then, he chuckles like Shiro is the biggest idiot for thinking that he’s earned it. Although putting space between their bodies sounds like the last thing in the universe that Shiro should do, he angles back and peers down at Keith’s hips.

What he’s looking for doesn’t jump out at him; Keith’s stomach droops out before him, sagging lower than Shiro’s noticed before now. Long stretch marks arc around its curves like bolts of bright red lightning, and several shorter ones have cropped up, especially near Keith’s hips and belly-button. Shiro’s thumb trembles as he traces it down one of those stripes, the signs of how much bigger Keith’s been getting and how quickly he’s put on all this weight. Bless those rolls of chub, blossoming out all over Keith’s thick midsection, with that dip where Keith used to have such a slender waistline and the heavier

God, Shiro should say _something_ while he’s staring—so many old insults erupt in his head, things that he’s spent most of his life hearing, all overwhelming each other, mushing up in a jumble of words that make no sense and won’t cooperate with Shiro’s mouth—but as he rubs Keith’s thigh, Shiro’s voice dries up. Drifting down to Keith’s hips, Shiro’s gaze stumbles onto a partial discovery: a slip of scarlet fabric clinging to his flesh and a line of black lace digging into his skin. Oh… _Oh_, sexy underwear. Amazing in their own right, but they _must_ have some other purpose here, something to further Keith’s vision for this clip…

Which spells itself out, clear as day, the more Shiro drinks in of how Keith looks right now. Only a sliver of his panties peek out where Shiro can see them; the rest of that straining fabric gets lost, either squashed beneath the chub along Keith’s side or hidden under his stomach’s hanging lower curve. Gently, Shiro grabs up two handfuls of that belly-fat. He kneads at Keith’s flesh, trying not to think of how much more of him there is to hold—trying to repress all thoughts of him one day getting too big for Shiro to get his arms around completely—trying to stay grounded, instead of getting lost in how easily Keith’s paunch yields, how it puts up no resistance when Shiro nudges it any which way and how it almost moves aside when his fingers press in deeper.

He finds the real treat when he lifts Keith’s stomach out of the way. Not only has Keith left his belly hanging out, he’s also grown a hole in his panties. Right near the top, it isn’t a tear, but a place where the fabric’s separated from the waistband. A curve billows out, showcasing a half-moon of Keith’s skin. Elastic and lace cut hard into his flesh, no doubt leaving behind angry red indentations. Stretched beyond its limits, the poor thing cleaves to Keith, struggles to keep him clothed, even though he can’t get them all the way up to his waistline. Too bad for that integrity, his bulk threatens to rip apart his panties.

Shiro leaves one hand on Keith’s belly. True, he needs to keep it in place—Shiro can’t have all of that delectable tummy flopping into his way, not while a goal calls to him like this—but he also can’t resist the urge to touch that exposed strip of skin. The pull’s too strong and so are Shiro’s impulses. Swallowing thickly, Shiro presses three fingertips into the open spot Keith’s left for him.

Insistently maintaining character, Keith only lets him have a huff and a shake of the head. “I just don’t understand all this _denial_,” he sneers. “I mean, I popped my shorts wide open, Pretty Boy. How can you insist that you have no idea what I’m showing you?”

“B-b-because you—you’re, like—you’re just—I’m—you’re beautiful, Ke—I, k—_kill_ me, Akira, _honestly_.”

Shiro’s voice stutters back to life. Each syllable makes him wonder if he’ll lose that ability again, struck speechless by the way Keith looks or by the feeling of his weight sloshing around on Shiro’s lap. The more Keith moves, the more Shiro’s cock twitches, and the more he burns, struggling to keep himself focused, to stay as clear-headed as possible so he can give Keith the performance he deserves. Shiro forces himself to keep breathing deeply, fights to keep himself from squirming too much, lest this go too quickly—

But Keith tuts, curling a finger underneath Shiro’s chin. “Honestly _what_, Sable?”

“Are you serious? How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Maybe I don’t believe you ‘cause I know it’s bullshit.” Keith pouts and bats those unfair eyelashes. Arching his back so his tum sticks out even further, he rubs his plump ass along Shiro’s crotch. Probably accidental—he wrinkles his nose at Shiro’s gasping, so he likely didn’t expect a reaction—but as Keith pushes his palms into his belly-fat and groans, he writhes on Shiro like it’s not enough to turn him on without making him feel every ounce Keith has to throw around.

As he jostles his chub, shakes it by way of emphasizing how much there is, Keith shifts his hips _just so_. “I’ve gotta be up a hundred pounds by now,” he drawls over top of Shiro’s needy whining. “Or at least I’m definitely pushing that. I couldn’t squeeze this humongous, bulbous, _gut_ into any of my t-shirts—never _mind_ borrowing _your_ shirts ever again—”

“But I love it when you wear my tops. When they cling to your gorgeous body? When they show everybody how voluptuous—”

“My stretch-marks have damn near multiplied, Sable! They’re bigger, and there’s more of them, I’ve got them all over every single roll of paunch—and, look! I’m practically _bursting out_ of my poor panties—”

“Oh, you really want that? You want to burst out of them?” An incredulous look from Keith makes Shiro grin. He doesn’t know why; his lips just twist that way as a low chuckle falls out of his mouth. “There’s only one way _that’s_ gonna happen, Baby.”

The fabric doesn’t fight, when Shiro shoves four fingers in. Seams pop, relieved to have him tugging on them. As Shiro yanks the fabric, he doesn’t look away from Keith and doesn’t need to. The panties come undone as easily as tissue paper. Leaving their whole front ripped open, Shiro drops Keith’s belly with a sound like _fwump!—_and he wants to watch Keith’s chub bounce so badly that it burns. But he forces himself to watch Keith’s face instead, lest he miss something important or let Keith get any wrong ideas. Worse, Shiro’s likely right up on the line of breaking character—

“How can you _possibly_ have no words for this, Sable?” Shifting on Shiro’s lap, Keith squishes against Shiro’s thighs, heavy but not giving up as much as he could. “For all of the weight I’ve put on lately? For what I’ve _done_ to myself?”

“I just _don’t_ have them, Baby—”

“Here, let me get you started—”

“You don’t need to—”

“I’m fat like a manatee,” Keith purrs, scooting back into Shiro’s personal space, dragging his ass along Shiro’s crotch and grinding down like he has no idea what he’s doing, bumping all his belly-fat into Shiro’s abs but still holding back.

Shiro bites his lip. “Baby, come on—”

“I’m so big, I make baby elephants look skinny.” Leaning even further into Shiro, Keith sprawls out on Shiro as much as he can without simply knocking him onto his back. Snaking his arms around Shiro’s shoulders, Keith slithers on his hips; his belly shakes, jostling his flab, and all that weight teases along Shiro’s groin. “I’m such a butterball anymore, you could stuff me up and roast me for Thanksgiving—”

“Baby, _please_—”

“I’m so fat, I cast a fifty-pound shadow. Most days, I have more calories in my stomach than in the supermarket. Maybe I _used_ to be an athlete, but now I’ve got a body like melted ice cream.” Angling himself around, Keith grazes his stomach along Shiro’s. Traitors that they are, Shiro’s hips. “I’ve put on so much weight, Sable, a _photo_ of me would topple off the wall.”

“_Akira_…”

Heat twining through his body, Shiro writhes. He twists, knocks himself into Keith’s backside. Which makes the heat burn hotter as his cock rubs against the plush curves of Keith’s ass. Contact like that hurts, and how much _more_ of it Shiro wants—_fuck_, he needs so much more of it, needs so much more of _Keith_—trying to wriggle back further only makes Shiro’s hips rock up into Keith again, pressing and worrying at Keith’s ass. A whine creaks up and out of Shiro’s throat, all his own fault. He could hold himself together more, could stop moving under Keith like he has no idea what he’s doing to himself, no idea how he’s getting himself hard and throwing lighter fluid on the fire inside him.

With a low chuckle, Keith knocks his belly into Shiro’s abs. His eyes get a hot, hungry, knife’s-edge glint as Shiro hits the mattress. It shocks straight to his dick, the way Keith smirks—God, as if Shiro _needs_ that extra jolt right now—and he wriggles, his body chasing after Keith’s no matter how much Shiro tells himself to behave, keep still, and do this _properly_. Helpless, he gasps as Keith edges back and off of him; the breath comes out as a whimper, which makes Keith scratch at Shiro’s side.

“Something you wanna tell me, Babe?” Eyebrows arched, Keith leans in toward Shiro. His belly skirts the lower edge of Shiro’s crotch but doesn’t get as close as Keith could. As if he has no idea what he’s doing, as if he has no idea what he’s denying Shiro right now, he teases the backs of his fingers along Shiro’s hip. “Or are you gonna keep pretending you’ve got no idea how fat I’m getting?”

“Akira…” Shiro gulps, propped up on his elbows. “Akira, please?”

“Mmm, please _what_, Sable?”

“I need you so much, Baby. Please—”

“Nope, not specific enough. You _know _what I’m asking you—”

“But you can’t—Akira, please don’t make me say it, just—” Shiro chokes down a whimper. Of their own accord, his legs spread wider. As he squirms, he tries not to think of how it might be someday in the future, if Keith ever gets to big that Shiro needs to strain himself, just to get his legs spread wide enough for his Baby. Hoping that he’ll banish those thoughts, Shiro lets his mouth take over: “Please, Akira? Stop trying to make me say it. I can’t. I _won’t_. You haven’t put on _that_ much—not really—you _haven’t_, your weight, it’s not—not like what you’re saying? You really, _really_ aren’t that big, okay, Baby? And besides, you’re _beautiful_, no matter what you weigh.”

This pleading should make Keith smile, soften his disposition, really cut to the action.

Instead, he barks out a laugh. “Y’know, you really had me going for a while.” Shaking his head, he drags his hand down Shiro’s thigh. The fabric scrapes down his skin as Keith inches him out of his boxer-briefs. “You _almost_ had me fooled and buying your garbage, Sable. With all that pretending like you don’t know I’m getting _fat_.”

“I—wait, are you?” A chill curls around Shiro’s lungs—_Oh, no. Please don’t start coughing. Please don’t start coughing. Please don’t_—but Keith rubs his thumb down Shiro’s shaft, and everything flushes warm again. Despite the hand promising to caress his cock but never making good on what it teases—despite the fact that Keith could give him so much more—Shiro shudders, all from Keith needling at him when he’s sensitive and close to catching fire from how much he _wants_. His hips rock up into Keith’s touch. So help him, he can’t keep his eyes open, can’t force himself to meet Keith’s gaze.

But Shiro can insist, “I don’t know what you’re—or what you _think_ you’re—I really _don’t_, Baby, I—_oh_—”

Angling himself _just right_, Keith twitches his hips. His belly wobbles, thumping against Shiro’s thigh, and Shiro chews on his lip as another flare of lust takes over. One of his knees curls up, pushing that thigh toward Keith, pressing into his pliant flesh. Chasing something Keith doesn’t want to let him have, Shiro’s hips lurch off the mattress and toward Keith. Only giving up a snort, he pushes Shiro down again.

“God, you beautiful little liar.” Keith fondles Shiro’s thigh, fingertips kneading gently.

Holding Shiro’s leg in place, Keith worms along him, wriggles so Shiro can’t help but feel every ounce of Keith’s body that moves on his own. Heat tingles beneath his skin as Keith’s chub squishes against his muscle, so soft, and so ample, and so sweet that even this slightest contact makes Shiro’s cock leak and his heart shudder like it could give out. The more Keith jostles all his weight on Shiro, the more it’s some kind of miracle that Shiro doesn’t talk over him, that he doesn’t cut Keith off by whining, _Baby, please, I need you_. 

As Keith leans back into Shiro’s space—as he edges closer, snaking and snugging his paunch on Shiro’s cock, cocooning his length in warmth and squish and cushion—as Shiro’s hips buck again, urging up at Keith’s midsection as if dragging himself along Keith will do anything aside from tying knots of longing and tight heat, shoveling fuel on the flame that wants to burst out of Shiro’s chest—it’s all he can do to grit his teeth and focus. _Jesus_, what is the matter with him? He can’t come undone before Keith’s even fucked him. No matter how big Keith’s gotten—no matter how much his flesh yields when his hips drive Shiro’s back down to the bed—no matter how much Shiro yearns to get lost in the soft rolls of Keith’s gut and never come back out, he has to keep himself together.

While Shiro clutches at the sheets and makes himself breathe deeply, his heart thunders loud enough, he almost misses Keith drawling, “You’re only playing stupid with me because you _want_ this, don’t you?”

“_Yes,_ God—I mean, no—I didn’t mean it like—You’re—Of course I _want_ you—Baby, please, I—”

“Is fucking you the only way I can make you admit to this—”

“Admit to what—what in the—I don’t—”

“Admit to what I’ve been _saying_, Sable. Admit to what kind of fat-assed, flabby-thighed, seam-ripping, jean-busting beached baby whale you’ve got plopped and jiggling _right in front of you_.” By way of emphasizing that idea, Keith squirms and shakes his gut. His rolls graze along Shiro’s shaft and hips, flesh quivering as Keith bears down on Shiro’s cock and makes Shiro’s breath snag in his throat. “How many times do I have to ask you to be honest with me about what kind of flabby, blubber-laden _blob_ I’ve let myself turn into?”

“Nothing—I mean, no one—No, you aren’t—you’re not—Baby, I can’t—”

“Can’t tell a lie? Uh, yeah, I’ve noticed.” Quirking his head, Keith snorts. “You almost let me think you hadn’t noticed anything. Not about my weight. Or about how badly I’ve let myself go. Or about _all_ of this.”

With both hands and a cruel twist to his lips, he heaves his belly up and out of the way. When Shiro sneaks a glimpse of Keith’s cock, it glistens, slick with pre-come, and _fuck-Christ-dammit_, Shiro _needs_ to feel Keith inside him, thick and long, going as deep as Keith wants, with his belly rubbing all over Shiro’s abs and cock. Until Keith spills that gorgeous, stretch-marked mass of chub onto Shiro’s hips, his flesh threatens to melt out of his hands, all droopy and doughy and practically flowing as Keith mushes it around.

Heavy and soft, Keith’s belly-fat shifts on Shiro as he arches his back, teasing his way ever closer. Each time he moves, Shiro holds his breath, hopes that this is it, _this_ moment is the one where Keith finally makes good on what he’s promised.

Not that it’s bad for Shiro, feeling the way Keith’s stomach crowds in on him and how Keith’s paunch envelops his cock. Each little twitch of Keith’s hips makes Shiro’s legs curl up, pushing him closer to Keith, or into a better position. Each little bounce of his belly makes Shiro’s heart lurch like it’ll plummet out of him if Keith doesn’t fuck him good, and _soon_. Each little jerk of Keith’s body shakes his entire midsection—jiggling Keith’s rolls on Shiro like a jello-mold, letting Shiro feel Keith as much and as fully as he can right now, treating him to more than he could get in most positions without Keith fully sitting on his chest, trying to crush him like a grape—and Shiro’s body just reacts, trying to meet Keith in the middle, or follow where he leads, or whatever Shiro needs to do for Keith to fuck him.

God help him, Shiro’s hanging on—but the longer he does, the more it feels like he’s gonna _die_. Each little wobble of Keith’s gut surrounds his cock, and as Keith’s chub trembles on him, Shiro can’t help whining. He needs to hold on, can’t ruin the shoot by coming early. But oh God, Shiro’s brain is crying. His body is on fire. His feet kick futilely at the sheets, stuck in some endless, Sisyphean cycle of losing their footing and getting it back and losing it again, all because Keith decides to torment him, driving his hips on Shiro’s in long, slow, careful motions, dragging his belly up Shiro’s shaft and down again, sloshing his flab on Shiro’s own taut, hard stomach like he could drown Shiro in all the weight he’s gained—and never once letting up on Shiro’s cock, rutting on Shiro and all but outright pinning him to the goddamn mattress.

With a smirk that knows exactly what he’s doing, Keith trails his fingers down Shiro’s thigh. He teases two of them at Shiro’s hole, snickers at the gasp and the needy, wordless, keening sound he coaxes out of his boyfriend. But when Keith tries to push in his fingertips, Shiro shakes his head and whines.

“Babe?” Keith’s shoulders drop, his eyes go soft, and _“Akira”_ falls away immediately, leaving only Keith himself. His hands curls around Shiro’s thighs, right where Shiro can see them. “Are you… Should I do something different.”

“Fuck me?” Shiro nods, resting on one elbow as he reaches for Keith’s wrist. “Please, Baby. I need you. I can’t—not much longer?”

Keith smiles, kissing Shiro’s knee. “As you wish.”

His fingers nudge at Shiro’s entrance again. He whispers his intent—_“I just wanna check, in case you need more lube”_—and waits for Shiro to nod that it’s alright. Gasping, Shiro takes two of Keith’s fingers at once. Tightening around them, he almost begs Keith to keep going, because he works his touch through Shiro too well to waste it on only making sure that Shiro is _fuck, so ready for him_.

“_God_,” Shiro bites out through a needy moan. “‘s an understatement.”

Keith snickers and Shiro needs to choke down another keening sound. One hand clutching at the sheets, Shiro makes himself keep breathing. He worries his other hand down Keith’s shoulder and chest, massaging the plushy mound where Keith used to have only flat planes and hard angles. The give of Keith’s flesh, the way he sighs when Shiro squeezes him just right—those signs remind Shiro that everything’s okay. No, he hasn’t bottomed in far too long but nothing will go wrong.

Keith wouldn’t let anything bad happen to Shiro. Not because they’re getting paid for this, but because it’s _Shiro_, and Keith loves him.

Writhing beneath him, Shiro angles his hips more into his boyfriend’s orbit. Keith’s belly-fat sloshes against his abs as his tip rubs on Shiro’s hole. Whether he means it or not, Keith shifts around as he takes hold of Shiro’s hips, creaking the mattress and its box-spring, and—_Jesus_, his paunch wobbles on Shiro, rolls quivering against his skin, setting him ablaze with how much he _needs-fuck-wants-fuck-now-please-needs_ Keith, _needs_ his boyfriend, **_needs_** to feel this and go all the way with Keith and—

Shiro’s breath hitches as Keith pushes into him. His leg curls up from how _good_ Keith feels—how _thick_—knee twisting into Keith’s fleshy side. Reflexively, like they’re already on the same wavelength, Shiro bucks into Keith right as Keith drives further into him.

Keith’s groan echoes through Shiro so hard, he’d swear he feels Keith’s chub tremble from the force of that sound escaping him. A moan bursts out of Shiro as Keith finds _such_ a sweet spot inside him—not _the_ sweet spot, not the one, but _fuck_, Keith hits him just right—and as Shiro feels Keith’s pudge truly squishing and bouncing on his own flat, taut stomach, shudders racket through his ches. 

Whenever Keith pulls back, Shiros heart-rate spikes. Keith could slip his girth out of Shiro. Keith could decide that they’re done already. Keith could get bored of this entanglement, he could have second thoughts about Shiro—but each time, Shiro fights those demon thoughts back to Hell, where they belong. Refusing to let himself whine, he steadies his nerves by grabbing two handfuls of Keith’s gut, by rubbing Keith’s belly and sinking his fingers into Keith’s flesh. Keith always comes back to him, grinding down on Shiro and pounding into him harder, then slower and deeper, then harder and deeper still.

Arcing into Keith’s thrusts, Shiro tightens around him, tries to give as good as he’s getting, all so Keith might keep gasping and moaning, inhaling sharply and tugging his stomach away from Shiro’s hands then letting his belly surge back out to its full glory, cascading onto Shiro’s midsection and spilling over his cock each time Keith exhales.

On their own, Keith’s thrusts fill Shiro up and delve inside him exactly right. His heart races and _God_, if he can’t feel Keith’s own pulse—in his chest, when Keith squishes his belly between them and leans down closer; in his wrists, first pressed against Shiro’s hip-bones, then snaking up his sides; in his cock, pressing into him relentlessly, teasing so well that Shiro grips onto Keith’s back-rolls, digs his fingers into that soft fat like hanging onto his Baby will help Shiro hold onto his composure, help keep him from unraveling yet. Probably doesn’t help much, but dammit, Shiro needs to hold on. He cannot let Keith down.

Whether anything helps him or not, though, Shiro’s allowed to touch Keith. He’s allowed to press his arm into the bulge of Keith’s stomach and curl his fingers up tight, squeezing every ounce of his boyfriend’s flesh, and clenching around Keith’s shaft as he wonders exactly how much Keith weighs. Definitely more than Shiro, but that’s not news. God, how much bigger could Keith get, how much more weight could he pack onto his frame, if they actually went through with one of his more out-there ideas and liveblogged a thirty-day diet for his subscribers.

Keith pounds into Shiro so hard, Shiro’s elbow gives out beneath him. His head thumps into the mattress before he can even think of using his well-toned core to keep from falling. God, it’s like Keith can tell that Shiro’s mind was wandering. Straining to grope Keith’s thick, fat ass makes him jerk in and out so fast, Shiro would miss it, if Keith didn’t scratch at his hip, keeping Shiro grounded by clawing like he means to break the skin.

God, if he did that—if he marked up Shiro’s chest and stomach, and littered his neck with hickeys—if he spelled out that claim all over Shiro’s skin… Moaning, Shiro throws his head back and rolls his hips down, welcoming Keith deeper into him.  


More than anything else, though, Keith’s new size really does the trick. All his chub bears down on Shiro, blanketing his abs and chest. Extra weight throws itself around, throws more force behind every thrust—_“Oh God,”_ Shiro keens, bucking into one of them, _“Baby, you’re so big, ‘s so much of you, so heavy”_—letting Keith go harder as he rams into Shiro, hitting his sweet spot _exactly right_. Every push from Keith slaps his glorious, beautiful gut against Shiro’s muscles; the sound cracks and rolls, like thunder. Each time he twitches his hips, Keith shakes his belly’s thick, flabby underside, jiggles it around Shiro’s cock, and makes Shiro’s insides lurch with a heat that’s easily as good as how Keith’s fucking him.

Sheathed in that warm cushion of pudge—in some of the clearest evidence of how big Keith’s gotten, of how big he’s _getting_—Shiro could lose himself in his boyfriend’s flesh and regret nothing. Keith’s bulk could swallow Shiro up and Hell, that would be magic.

Before too long, Keith might plump up enough for that. Already, the rolls of his stomach spill over Shiro’s sides as he leans down enough to yank Shiro into a kiss, hot and slow and hungry, as if Shiro’s mouth is the last brownie left and Keith intends to savor him. His chub doesn’t hit the mattress, but with the way Keith’s rolls snug along Shiro’s bones and muscles, Shiro can’t help feeling that Keith might not be that far off, might only need a few more pounds to completely envelop Shiro.

The mere thought of that—the idea of Keith getting so much bigger—makes Shiro kiss back harder. He flings himself headlong into Keith’s mouth, sucks on Keith’s tongue and sucks the air out of his lungs. Keith shivers on him, chub rippling all over Shiro as Keith whines from the lack of oxygen. As soon as Shiro lets him breathe again, he pants, chest heaving in short, staccato bursts. His next thrust goes slowly, but not lazily. He groans from the effort, slumping so his flushed forehead knocks into Shiro’s. Beads of sweat sizzle on Shiro’s skin, dripping onto him, rolling off of Keith’s face and neck.

“Skinny little bitch,” he mutters against Shiro’s cheek. Nuzzling at him as if to let Shiro know he didn’t really mean that insult, Keith smears more of that sweat on Shiro, and it should feel disgusting—but as Keith kisses him again, Shiro twines his fingers up in Keith’s hair. Soft but slicked down with still more sweat, it clings to Shiro’s hand. Pushing into Shiro’s sweet spot again, Keith grunts. “‘s this what gets you off, Pretty Boy?”

“You do, Baby. You do, I love—”

“But I meant you acting like this about my chub.” Keith snickers, twisting his hips and fucking deeper into Shiro, the deepest he’s gone yet. “You let me stuff my face full to bursting, let me chow down like a greedy, spoiled pig, always going, ‘Don’t worry, Baby, just eat until you’re full.’”

Shiro gulps, clutching Keith close to him. His fingers tug Keith’s hair, and Keith grins into another kiss, and stars burst through Shiro’s mind, his chest, and everything in him flares up, white-hot—“Baby, _please_—hurry—‘m so close—”

“_Months_ now, you’ve just let me binge on sweets, and treats, and junk food.” Keith nibbles Shiro’s lip, heaves a deep breath, and speeds up, thrusting faster but no less deep, panting as Shiro clenches around him, tries to help push Keith to his edge. “Haven’t said a goddamn thing about my weight while I’ve gorged myself enough for two and gotten, like, _irreparably_ fucking fat. You’ve only told me it’s okay to skip the gym just one more time.”

Grinding up into Keith’s hips, Shiro drags his cock up and down, moves along Keith’s belly as Keith bears down on him. More sweat beads up on Keith’s face and the back of his neck. He keeps working himself up, working in Shiro, and his cheeks bloom with red. As Keith rams into that sweet spot, his hardest thrust yet, Shiro kicks at the sheets and fights himself to just hang on a little longer. He buries his face in Keith’s neck and his fingers in Keith’s chub, digging hard at Keith’s back-rolls and breathing the warm scent of his skin. Not much more to wait. Keith won’t do that to him. Shiro will come soon. He can keep himself together, he can, he _knows_ he can—

“You’ve watched my waistline totally _balloon _with blubber—” Keith ruts on Shiro so hard, the rolls of his belly slosh all the way up to Shiro’s chest. “Watched my abs melt into this enormous, flabby _gut_—” His chub quivers as he jerks it back into place. “Watched me blimp out and lied to me that I don’t look bigger—” Ripples surround Shiro’s cock, and Keith’s weight snugs around him, warm and safe. “Then shoved me extra helpings like I’m not already packing on the pounds.”

Shiro writhes, urging his abs into the swell of Keith’s stomach. “Baby—Baby, please—”

“Then, now you’ve got me all plump and round and fattened up?” Keith grinds down harder, body shaking against Shiro’s, from the effort and just from hefting his extra poundage. “Now that I’ve let myself go, the way you wanted?” Another thrust, then another, then another, all in quick succession, while Keith’s stomach jiggles and he groans, hard, into Shiro’s mouth. “You just want all this weight on top of you—”

“Just want _you_, I want—”

“You want me fucking you like this.” Keith goes in, rough and deep, growling as he buries himself in Shiro, all the way in. “You want my big, fat belly helping me do it.” He’s panting harder than ever, now. Each quick thrust—each quirk of his hips—and Keith struggles to keep breathing. God, is he close, yet? Is that it? Or is it just—“You turned me into a total hog. Now, you wanna give me a workout like I still know how to _find_ the gym.”

Shiro can’t come up with any words. Mewling, he can only kiss on Keith, squeezing a roll of belly-fat.

“_Jesus_,” Keith bites out, jerking his belly on Shiro’s shaft again. “You’re gonna drown in sweat, if you keep me gaining, Pretty Boy.” A groan from Shiro makes Keith plunge back in again. “Get me too much bigger and I’ll fucking _crush_ you.”

That’s it. That does it. Or maybe it’s the way Keith jiggles as he fucks into Shiro’s sweet spot one last time. Fireworks go off, heat whiting out Shiro’s vision—drowning out his mind—as his entire body tenses up like a rubberband about to snap. His orgasm rockets through him, shaking him harder than the moan makes his chest shudder. He keeps Keith close, toned arms rubbing into Keith’s fat until finally, one more twitch of Keith’s belly gives Shiro the one last shove he needs.

Pushed over that edge, Shiro unravels and he comes. He goes slack beneath Keith and only keeps his arms in place because letting go of Keith would be the worst of all possible things to have happen. Shiro doesn’t know what would come from letting Keith go; surely, nothing good. Boneless and flushed, in a contented haze, he plays with Keith’s sweat-sticky hair, gasps and writhes on reflex while Keith finishes himself off.

As Keith’s groan erupts and he comes, Shiro expects his boyfriend to roll away, onto his back and the mattress, away from Shiro. Instead, Keith collapses onto Shiro’s chest in a warm, pudgy heap. He slithers against Shiro, flesh wobbling all the way, but he only keeps it up until he’s comfortable enough to curl up like a tubby, exceptionally satisfied, fat kitten. Dropping his head onto Shiro’s chest, Keith goes still, save for how each breath makes his back rise and fall.

Dimly, Shiro realizes that Keith’s sweat should nauseate him, at least slightly. But since it doesn’t, he keeps stroking Keith’s hair, getting his hand all over the sticky mess. For anybody else, he’d mind—but not so much with Keith. Definitely not while Keith’s snuggling up to him like this, sighing as if nothing ever has or ever will be wrong in their universe.

“Lemme know if it gets too heavy,” he mumbles, nuzzling at one of Shiro’s pecs. “Don’t wanna hurt you.”

“You won’t, Baby.” Shiro struggles with the awkward angle, but manages to kiss Keith’s forehead. His skin smolders beneath Shiro’s lips, and the sweat leaves behind a salty taste. “You could gain another fifty pounds or more and try to squash me like a bug, and it still wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Would so too if I put good effort into it.”

“Good pain, though. Pain that I want, b’cause it’s you. I mean, you on top of me—like now, but sitting up, so I _really_ feel it, y’know? Feel all your weight on my chest and stomach.” When Keith snorts, Shiro wrinkles his nose. “‘m serious, Baby. You wouldn’t hurt me, not even doing that. Not even bouncing on me, and _jiggling_, and every single pound of you, all that chub, just bearing down—”

“God, shut _up_,” Keith whines, batting gently at Shiro’s jaw. “‘s no fair, talking dirty to me like that. You _know_ I can’t go again, not yet.”

“Sorry, Baby.” Shiro hugs him around the waist and shoulders. “Didn’t mean to get you going. ‘s just an idea I’ve had.”

“Yeah, well, keep it on-tap, okay?” A quick round of squirming, and Keith makes a sound like he’s trying not to yawn. Shiro’s breath sticks in his throat, because there’s no way that Keith is actually promising anything like what he thinks—no way that he’d actually want to go to that particular place with Shiro—but as he nestles in on Shiro’s chest, Keith lets slip, “Sounds like it could be pretty hot, so? Talk about it later?”

If not for refractory periods, that promise alone could get Shiro hard all over again.


	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “I hate bottle episodes. They’re wall-to-wall facial expressions and emotional nuance. I might as well sit in the corner with a bucket on my head”—Abed Nadir, _Community_ (s02e03, “Cooperative Calligraphy”).
> 
> —All levity aside, this chapter is A Lot. It’s literally just Shiro and Lance trying to hash out the problems they’ve been having, why the problems exist, and what they can do about it, with Shiro talking a _lot_ about how fucked up his body was before and how badly straight-size people treat fat people. A lot of what he says was an attempt at injecting more kink-pandering stuff into the conversation—adding details and Shiro’s descriptions of these feelings and experiences—in order to justify keeping around a chapter that I wanted to write, and that I felt was important in order to not let everything with Lance turn into a loose thread.

Almost pointedly defying everybody’s expectations, March doesn’t roll through like a lion or a lamb. More than anything else, the month goes by like an enormous, fluffy Samoyed made of snow, littering every surface with more of the white stuff, right when Shiro starts to think that winter’s over.

Come one fateful Thursday morning, though, everything starts thawing out. They’re well past the middle of the month, and finally, the weather reports come true. Sunlight sticks around, ice melts without reforming, and Shiro can take his morning runs outside for the sake of sunlight and fresh air, without worrying all the people who love him. Better yet, even with all the potential allergens coming out of the soil, Shiro’s immune system behaves itself.

Lotor’s, on the other hand, decides that several successful dates with Hunk is really quite enough good fortune and turns on Lotor. Seemingly out of nowhere, his body knocks him down flat with inflamed sinuses and horrid congestion that he can’t clear up. When he calls to say that he can’t make it to the apartment so they can work on the screenplay, his throat is so raw and his voice so mewling, that Shiro has to wonder why Lotor didn’t simply text him. Surely, that would’ve been so much easier for him, not to mention infinitely better for his healing.

“…I thought that you might feel that I was simply being dramatic,” Lotor offers, croaking softly, his voice thick. “And I thought that you would then be upset with me. And that you would think that I have allowed Hunk to distract me and stopped putting as much into our work as you do.”

Vaguely, Shiro has to wonder if Acxa or Zethrid tried to talk some sense into Lotor before letting him pick up the phone.

Somewhat less than vaguely, Shiro wants to punch his best friend’s parents. He wants to yell at them, take them to task on every single thing that they ever did to either of their sons, and force to accept some responsibility for the damage that they did to Lotor.

Unfortunately, doing that would likely only hurt Lotor, in the long run, so Shiro settles with giving him a sympathetic sigh.

“Barbie, if you’d texted me to say that you’re sick, I would’ve trusted you.” Shiro slips his glasses off. Rubbing at the bridge of his nose, Shiro tries to keep his tone as gentle as possible. “Now, get off the phone, go take your antihistamines, have some soup and some tea… Just rest and get better, alright?”

Thankfully, Lotor agrees without putting up any kind of fuss.

The downside: Lotor being responsible about his health leaves Shiro on his own for the day. Keith and Hunk and Pidge are all at work. Ryou and Allura have classes, both to teach and participate in as students. Sven, one hopes, is resting because Shiro’s pretty sure that he’s working a graveyard shift at the hospital tonight. Shiro finishes his last bit of work on his and Lotor’s latest grant proposal before he’s ready to call lunchtime, and the thought of working on the screenplay without his co-writer leaves a taste in Shiro’s mouth that reminds him, inexplicably, of cigarettes. It doesn’t feel right, low-key cutting Lotor out of the process, even for an afternoon. After all, their screenplay is as much Lotor’s baby as Shiro’s.

Turning to some backlogged editing work for Keith doesn’t feel good either, though. Doesn’t make him feel like he’s doing anything productive. Shiro slogs through it anyway, because they _need_ to get a new clip posted soon. Even if Keith’s subscribers haven’t started complaining on the message boards yet—even if they’re buying his clips and his new photos—Keith and Shiro need to upload content in a timely manner.

Granted, some of the more general clips have taken a backseat to a few other commission pieces, but regardless, Shiro has to get his part of the work done. If only this asinine malaise would leave him alone, life would probably be great. As good as it ever gets when Shiro has to be alone, anyway.

When someone knocks on the door part-way through Shiro’s plain egg sandwich, his heart skips a beat and leaps into his throat. Everyone’s supposed to be caught up in something else. Preoccupied with other concerns. Too busy for Shiro. Maybe Lotor started feeling better and got Ezor to bring him over? Not that Shiro would entirely like that option, because Lotor insisting on coming over to work would probably go back to his parents treating him like garbage. Even so, he’s grinning as he opens the door.

Seeing his guest, Shiro’s face and mood both fall into the Marianas Trench. Unwilling to miss out on the action, his black plastic glasses slide down his nose. Which would probably be great, if Keith decided to make a sexy librarian fantasy clip, but at the moment, it’s only marginally less annoying than being made to deal with… whatever this situation is.

Instead of Lotor, Lance stands there in flip-flops and a black t-shirt with a vintage theatrical release poster for _Return of the Jedi_ splashed across the chest, with his favorite blue plaid pajama bottoms riding low on his skinny hips. Dimly, Shiro wants to ask why Lance wouldn’t wear his warm slippers with the blue lion plushies on them, given that it’s still cold by Lance standards. Something about his expression and posture, however, suggests that Lance is in no mood for a question like that. With his shoulders hunched halfway and his arms folded over his chest, Lance pouts and glowers at Shiro like a kitten who’s been subjected to bath-time.

Two can play that game, though, so Shiro slouches right back at him. “Hunk isn’t home.”

“Uh, _yeah_, I know that? Come on, man, I know when my best buddy has work—”

“Keith isn’t here, either.” Heart writhing, Shiro swallows thickly. “I’ll tell him you stopped by.”

“Well, you _can_, if you want? But I’m not here to see your boyfriend—”

“Fine, I’ll tell _Hunk_ that you stopped by. First thing when he gets home. Everything’s copacetic.”

But when Shiro tries to close the door, Lance darts forward. He ducks under Shiro’s arm and, from the sound of it, throws himself into a tumble like he learned from a childhood of gymnastics classes. Given how he whines, Lance stuck his landing and feels Very Much Aggrieved that Shiro isn’t watching.

Since the empty hallway won’t judge him for it, Shiro rolls his eyes and shakes his head. Lance’s hijinks are about the last thing that he wants to deal with today. Even so, he points Lance to the coffee, tea, and other drinks (as if Lance doesn’t know where they are).

Slumping into his seat and combing his white fringe off his face, Shiro puts his glasses back on so he can work. He points out the cherry-chocolate cupcakes with chocolate ganache centers that Hunk made while stress-baking the other day, sitting on the counter. If Lance is going to invite himself in like this, then fine. He might as well have some of the cupcakes. God knows Shiro hasn’t had the stomach for anything more intense than toast and scrambled eggs, today.

Apparently, the cold shoulder treatment isn’t enough of a clue for Lance because he flops into the chair at Shiro’s right-hand side. As if everything between them is completely fine, he scoots closer to Shiro than he needs. He peers over Shiro’s shoulder at the laptop as if he _didn’t_ spend Shiro and Ryou’s birthday dinner wisecracking over literally everything that Shiro picked off the menu, making “jokes” about how reassured he felt to see that Shiro could still eat, and then doing nothing to retract any of the _“#NotMyShiro” _garbage that he started.

Leaning against Shiro’s bicep, Lance lets slip a pensive hum. “Dude… Do you know how to dom at all or what?”

Shiro huffs and wrinkles his nose. Deadpan, he parrots, “Or what.” 

“Lotor _said_ that you couldn’t dom your way out of a wet paper bag. But I didn’t _believe _him…?”

“He would know. He used to date me _and_ he’s seen some previous versions of this clip.”

“Seriously, dude. How did Keith even make it through the shoot without busting a gut? From _laughing_, I mean, not from stuffing his face.”

Grumbling, Shiro quirks his shoulders. He ponders a few possible answers, but ultimately, decides to go with silence.

Maybe it’s not exactly _nice_. It definitely doesn’t feel _kind_, even before Lance throws up a little keening sound like a puppy who pissed all over an antique rug. But if Lance is going to come over unannounced—if he’s going to insist on staying when the two friends who he still likes aren’t home—then he shouldn’t expect Shiro to drop everything and cater to his perpetual desire for attention.

After a few long moments of dead air, Lance sighs. He shifts in his seat and Shiro holds his breath. Yes. Good. This is it. Lance is going to get up, and leave, and go back to his own apartment, where he won’t have to deal with Not-His-Shiro anymore. Sure, Shiro will get a pang of hurt and longing inside his chest. Yeah, he won’t enjoy losing his sharpshooter. But Lance doesn’t want him around anymore, so why bother pretending—

Lance’s legs drop into Shiro’s lap, just like he would’ve done on any normal day (when Shiro was still fat).

When Shiro looks over to him, Lance hugs himself and sulks. Trembling as if he’s cold—then again, when _isn’t_ Lance cold?—he clamps his hand down tight around his elbow. Clings to it until his knuckles strain like they could rip clean through his skin. While Lance bobs one of his feet in time with a tune that only he can hear, Shiro turns back to his editing and pushes his glasses up his nose.

“Okay, I guess you need it spelled out for you.” Inhaling deeply, Lance looks Shiro in the eye. “Why are you acting so messed up toward me.”

Shrugging, Shiro leans closer to his screen. “I’m working on something.”

“On your and Keith’s _porn_. I can see that. Have you _saved_ recently?” When Shiro confirms that he has, Lance reaches over and snaps the laptop shut. Not sighing at him takes more effort than Shiro likes—especially when Lance adds, “Anything else to say for yourself?”

Shiro makes a noncommittal noise and drags his fingers through his bangs. “Just having a bad day, I guess—”

“Oh, no, no, no, no, _no_! You’ve been _having a bad day_ at me? For a few _weeks_ now. And that totally is _weeks, plural_, Shirito—”

“Which clearly means that I deserve to be interrogated while I’m trying to work—”

“Uh, yeah, it _does_. You’ve been all sullen, and moody, and pouting about _everything_ with me, and I’m getting pretty freaking _tired_ of it!” With all the self-awareness of a rock that is particularly allergic to self-reflection, Lance slouches in his chair and juts his lower lip out at Shiro (which Shiro would personally classify as pouting, but apparently, he doesn’t know anything anymore). “I wanna know why the Hell one of my _friends_ is acting like such a _dick_.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Shiro says flatly, tucking the white fringe behind his ear. “Guess it must be because I’m _not. _**_your_**_. Shiro.”_

Gulping audibly, Lance squirms. Drags his ankles along Shiro’s thighs. As he ducks his chin, his cheeks flush as if he’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Again, he kicks Shiro in the heart with guilt—but that, in turn, makes something hot and ghoulish flare up in Shiro’s chest. Taking a deep breath doesn’t help him any. Neither does a second one. After three, he still feels like his boiling blood could burn down a forest.

The only thing that steadies him, even a little bit: pushing Lance’s legs off of his lap, then curling one of his own up to his chest. Never could’ve done something like this before California. Even if Shiro could’ve _tried_, his flabby thighs would’ve ripped clean through his old jeans. No matter that those relics in Shiro’s closet are about the size of circus tents; he had more than enough excess bulk to tear through the fabric. More than once, he ripped his old clothes as easily as tissue paper because he was _just that big_.

Not anymore, though. Because whatever else he feels, he _did_ fix his body. Resting his chin on his knee, Shiro takes another deep breath and tries to shore up his resolve. He shuts his eyes. Tells himself not to look at Lance, not to relent or back down. Tells himself that Lance will go away if he doesn’t get the attention that never fails to pour gasoline on his internal fire.

Except Lance whimpers his name and it cracks on Shiro’s nerves like a slap across the face. Scraping his fingers along the denim of his jeans, Shiro grinds his teeth. In the back of his head, something tries to tell him that Lance didn’t mean it, but—

“Tell you what,” he snarls. “You’re not here to see Keith or Hunk. So, whenever I find where the fat, miserable, _spineless_ Shiro is hiding? I’ll tell him to come home right away because his Lancey-Lance misses him _so very terribly_—”

“Shiro, please, that’s not what I—”

“That way, everything will return to how you want it, right?”

“Wait, what d’you mean about how I want things? What is that supposed to…?”

“Don’t insult both of us like that. If you really don’t know what I mean, you’re smart enough to _guess_, Lance.”

Swallowing thickly, Shiro balls his hand up into a fist. His arm won’t stop trembling and his knuckles strain his skin. But maybe he’ll keep himself grounded while his mouth runs amok, spitting out, “You can have your gentle, placating pushover back. You can have the guy who made such a mess of himself and his body that he got winded and felt like fainting after only _half_ a flight of stairs. He’ll accommodate you, and shoulder your burdens, and want absolutely _nothing_ for himself. Then, you’ll have _your_ Shiro and you can send the annoying, defective, shallow jackass—i.e., _me _— back to Willy Wonka’s Shiro Factory.”

Breaking his resolution before he can think better of it, Shiro allows himself to glare at Lance. “Would _that _make you _happy_.”

For once in his life, Lance doesn’t have a snappy retort.

Faltering, he shakes his head. Wide-eyed, he gapes at Shiro and makes a high-pitched, keening sound. If he’d give himself the room to do so—and if he didn’t want to avoid getting a noise complaint from any of the neighbors—Lance would probably be raising all holy Hell and wailing like a banshee until his throat went raw.

Dimly, Shiro appreciates that Lance is showing this semblance of self-restraint. He can’t handle anything too noisy. Not right now. Lance’s most unfiltered self crashes into scenes and comes on like an explosion in a glitter factory: flashy and intense, sparkly and kind of an endearing mess, and more than anything else on Earth, raucously, cacophonously, thunderingly loud. If it’s grinding Lance’s gears to tone himself down—even ever-so-slightly, then Shiro’s grateful for that. No matter how much of a mess they’ve made between them, even if they can’t salvage anything? At least Lance has enough respect for Shiro not to go off as much as he could when he gets that Shiro’s nerves can’t take it.

_If only he’d had that kind of respect when he was going on about how I’m not his Shiro anymore_, he doesn’t allow himself to say because it feels like a cheap shot. _Maybe we wouldn’t have gotten into this position in the first place, if he’d bothered to try holding literally any of those comments back._

Lance’s restraint would also go down more easily if he wouldn’t rock in his chair.

And if he wouldn’t keep making those throaty little whining noises.

_And_ if he wouldn’t tap his thumbs against his thighs in a pattern that, as far as Shiro can tell, is probably meant to match the _Super Mario Bros. _theme music.

**_And_** if he wouldn’t insist on scuffing his feet along the floor, thwapping his flip-flops around and dragging along the hardwood like a nail-file digging at Shiro’s eardrums and sandpaper chafing at his central nervous system like Keith’s thighs—

“Oh my _God_!” Shiro smacks the edge of the table. Inhaling sharply, he can’t take back the way these words burst out of him. But he tries to get himself back under the vaguest semblance of control before— “I keep spare fidget toys for Keith and Hunk in my room. Top-right drawer of my desk. Should be next to my hardback collection of Oscar Wilde’s letters. _Please_, for the love of God, Lance…”

Letting himself sigh, Shiro waves over at his bedroom. “If we’re _really_ gonna do this? Go get a toy to play with. For both our sakes. _Please_.”

While Lance scuttles off toward his room, Shiro skulks to the kitchen. When he comes back with a refilled glass of water, Lance has started flicking the joystick on a brightly colored fidget cube. Since the ball’s in Lance’s court right now, Shiro slips back into his seat and takes a long drink. He fights to keep his breathing slow and even. Holds back from tapping his own fingers on the table because that might further aggravate Lance’s anxiety. If _that_ happens, then _both_ of them are screwed because _Lance’s_ anxiety will grind on Shiro’s nerves until it becomes _his_ anxiety as well. Until they’re stuck on the edge of an abyss and—

“Okay, I’m not, like? _Intentionally_ stalling, or whatever? I’m just…” Lance groans softly and lets his head loll back so that he’s babbling at the ceiling. “I’m torn between about five or six different things right now? And I don’t even… I don’t want to make things, I don’t know? Like—”

“Start with whatever feeling’s coming in the strongest,” Shiro mutters, resting his cheek in his palm. “Not like I’m doing anything else until we get this over and done with. You won’t go home without answers, and if you hang around while you’re in a mood? I won’t be able to focus.”

“Damn right I’m not leaving until I get some answers. So, first of all?” Setting his jaw, Lance huffs and tries to glare at Shiro. He butts his heel at Shiro’s thigh; it hits like the times when Blue decides to bap Shiro in the nose. “I’m not here to push you away, alright? I’m here to try and get you _back_, so how about you quiznakking _stop it_ with acting like I don’t want you around!”

Shiro hums. “Am I allowed to respond while we’re working through your five or six things?” Once he gets Lance’s go-ahead, he chokes down a sigh. “For one thing, I didn’t _go_ anywhere. California, physically. But in spirit, though? Nothing changed. Not on my end, anyway. For another thing—”

“We’re gonna be here all day, aren’t we—”

“I sure as Hell hope not. But as I was _saying_…”

Shiro tries to look Lance in the eye—but he cringes away when Lance’s quivering pout threatens to set his nerves on fire. Jesus, this conversation is important. He should have the wherewithal to man up and make eye-contact with his friend. Still, Shiro can’t catch his breath—can’t draw in any breath at all—until he gives up and stares down at the table.

“Since Lotor and I got back from USC? You’ve acted like I’m a shallow, image-obsessed jerk who put myself through weight loss Hell _exclusively _so I could look _hot_.” Starting with the biggest piece of the puzzle makes logical sense—but it doesn’t make Shiro feel any less like he’s dragging the words out of himself, kicking and screaming. “You’ve jumped down my throat about what I eat. About what I _don’t_ eat. About food sensitivities that I’ve had since before I even met you—like going off at me as if you don’t know why I don’t like Hunk’s Chunky Monkey milkshakes. Why would you punish perfectly good coffee by mixing it with sugar and making_ both_ things taste _atrocious_—”

“Okay, yeah, that… That wasn’t one of my best moments, lately? And I realize that, but I thought that I _apologized_—”

“Then, there’s the whole, _‘Not My Shiro’_ garbage—obviously.” Shiro inhales deeply—but some part of him still wants to put his fist through a brick wall. Something hot and brash and angry crawls along the back of his neck like a scourge of mosquitoes, and Shiro yearns to punch something. “You’ve been trying to pull back on those jokes and I appreciate it. But you made one on my _birthday_. While we were at dinner with all of our friends. Including my _brother_, your _boyfriend_, who I _know_ has talked to you about how much I don’t like those jokes—”

“Well, yeah, but it wasn’t meant to be, like… Any kind of… I didn’t want to hurt you or—”

“I _know_ that you didn’t want that, Lance. That’s not your style. If you’d wanted to hurt me, you would’ve been more direct about it and infinitely more obvious.” Not that this admission keeps Shiro from sighing as he adds, “But most of the time you’ve spent clean from making those ‘Not My Shiro’ jokes where I could hear or see you doing that? You’ve been in _Cabaret_ rehearsals. So, how could I know what you were doing? Never mind how I _told you_ how much I didn’t like those jokes—”

“But I didn’t know _why_! I thought you _were_ just having bad days. Except it kept _happening_—”

“But would it have killed you to shut up and_ stop_?” Sucking in a deep breath, Shiro finally manages to make himself glower at Lance’s face. “If one of your alleged friends tells you, ‘Hey, I don’t like you making these so-called jokes about how I’m not really myself anymore, can you knock it off’? Why would you _keep going_ with said joking?”

Shiro’s teeth grind on each other of their own accord. As Lance spins the gears on his fidget cube, Shiro digs a thumb into his forefinger’s knuckle. Grinds against the bone because the pressure and the pain are helping anchor him in the moment. Helping keep him from floating off into the nebulous realm of his own garbage feelings. Even if Lance poked the bear on this one—even if he dug himself into this hole through his own actions and his own choices—that’s no reason for Shiro to get lost and make this conversation more difficult than it already is.

With a huff, Shiro shakes his head and lets the end of his ponytail brush along the back of his neck. For his sake as much as Lance’s, he wraps up, “My point here being: where in all of that, _exactly_, was I supposed to feel like you actually want me around anymore?”

“I don’t _know_, okay!” That admission comes out of Lance with the force of a gunshot and, even with his fidget cube, he can’t help kicking his legs at thin air. “I thought that I was texting you enough while Nyma lets us take breaks? And tagging you on Instagram—I mean, after you got your account back and everything? And, and, and, I just? I dunno, okay, you’re a freaking _genius_, man! You, and Allura, and Pidge, and Lotor? You all work on mental levels that I can’t even get close to? So, I was just like, ‘Yeah, so, Shiro will be fine with everything, he isn’t really gonna, and it isn’t like he’ll, I’m, _I DON’T_**_ KNOW_**?’”

Groaning loudly, Lance whacks the fidget cube’s joystick so hard that it’s a miracle he doesn’t dislodge the stupid thing. “I guess I thought you’d figure it out on your own? I thought that you’d put everything together fine, with the joking, and the trying not to joke, and reaching out like with the texts? I thought—”

“You thought that I’d hear one of my _best friends_ insisting that losing weight means that I am no longer myself—means that I am no longer the person who he recognizes and accepts as _his_ Shiro—and somehow, magically intuit that you—”

“God, I’m _sorry_ about that ‘Not My Shiro’ crap, okay?” Sticking out his lower lip, Lance _looks_ like he should be tearing up. Yet, his eyes remain dry and his voice remains more or less stable as he says, “That joke was a dick move, and I get that now. But when you complained before, I honestly didn’t get how much it was upsetting you. I didn’t get that until Ryou, Keith, _and_ Lotor all talked to me about it. Because I seriously never, _ever_ meant to hurt you. Or make you feel like you aren’t really my friend. Or like you aren’t important to me, okay? And I know I’m an idiot, but? I’m _your_ idiot. And I’m an idiot who’s _sorry_ for hurting you like this.”

This apology is so heartfelt, it all but outright kicks Shiro in the lungs.

Kicking him in the lungs would probably be more merciful than tying him up in whatever this obnoxious, emotional twisting is. At least he could recover from a physical injury like that, as opposed to this moment, right now, where deep breaths don’t help him any and neither does a long drink of his water. In the hopes of keeping himself somewhat contained, he folds his hands up on the table—but that only leads to his thumb jittering against his forefinger, rather than quivering at the open air.

“Hey, Shiro?” Lance’s voice comes in softer, now. Gentler. “Are you… Can I… Do you need—”

“After a while, I didn’t _want_ you to know how much it upset me,” Shiro confesses, his own voice barely above a whisper. “I didn’t _want_ you to know why it upset me, or how badly it stung to hear you saying that, because like I said? I _know_ that you didn’t mean to hurt me. All I wanted was for you to _stop_.”

“And I _should_ have stopped, I get that. I’m sorry I didn’t stop. I’m sorry I kept going, even after you asked me not to. I’m sorry for being so stupid and ignoring you about this, and… Look, I don’t want to derail this too much? Or get caught up in some game of, ‘I said, you said’? Because what’s that gonna get for us except a whole lot of nothing?”

Trailing off into a sigh, Lance wilts. As most of his body sags toward the floor, he drags his hand back through his hair. “But the second thing that I’m bothered about,” he says, “is just… What about _my_ hurt feelings here?”

“You mean your hurt feelings about me shutting down and lashing out at you?” When this earns him a shake of Lance’s head, Shiro huffs and quirks his shoulders. “Then, you’re gonna need to get more specific about what you mean. Without some kind of clue, I can’t answer anything—”

“I mean, my hurt feelings about what you did in California, Shiro!” Lance’s face flushes bright red. The blush spills out from his cheeks, seeping down his neck and ebbing up to the tips of his ears—and taking a deep breath of his own only makes Lance wince as if in pain.

Shiro lets his shoulders droop. “You… have hurt feelings? About me _losing weight_? Because if that’s what you’re getting at, Lance? I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m also sure that my _health, well-being, and continued earthly existence_—”

“It’s not about the weight loss! It’s about the _secrecy_!”

This makes Shiro’s brow furrow up and his mouth flop open. “I’m… still not sure that I follow?”

“God, what kind of genius _are_ you, then! For the love of cheese, are you _serious_—”

Lance cuts himself off with a gasp. With another wince. Frantically mashing all five buttons on that side of his fidget cube, he seethes and flushes an even darker shade of red. But once he gets his breathing more or less under control, he huffs. “I’m not hurt that you lost weight, okay? I still don’t buy that it was about your _health_ as much as about _looking hot_—”

“Do you want me to get my journals about this process, Lance? My copies of the medical reports? My—”

“Hey! You _had_ your turn already! You’ll get another one later. But it’s Lancey-Lance time now, _capisce_?” When he gets a nod out of Shiro, Lance lets out a sigh so heavy, it seems to come up from the absolute deepest pit inside his chest—and again, he winces. “If losing weight is what you needed to do to be happy and healthy, then fine. You’re right. It’s your body and none of anybody else’s business. We should’ve supported you and done more to trust you, instead of being a bunch of uncle-quiznakking jerk-weasels who don’t actually know what you need, no matter how much we want to think we do—”

_Just get to the, “but” already and spare me the rest of this show_, Shiro doesn’t let himself say. He holds himself back from rolling his eyes, as well. And he definitely can’t spit out, _We both know you’re dying to undermine your own ostensible point—_

“_But!_” With another huff, Lance jams his thumb into the fidget buttons again. “What sticks out for me is this, Shirito: if you were _really_ losing weight for the sake of your health, then why didn’t you tell anyone back here about it? Except for Ryou, I mean, but even he only found out because _Aunt Satomi_ told him first. What _hurts me_ about this situation? Is that you spent an entire _year-and-a-fucking-half_ making this big change—or, whatever, a series of smaller changes that all added up to something bigger in the long run—and _not once_ did you tell any of us, _your _**_family_**, what you were doing.”

Lance could put so much more behind the glare he shoots at Shiro. He could put more effort into narrowing his eyes and screwing up his face so that he looks like a man who Super Definitely Means Some Serious Freaking Business. At the very least, he could _try_ to stop spinning the fidget cube’s plastic gears with his thumb.

All the same, that _Look_ sends a shiver down Shiro’s spine. Put together with that calling-out, he slouches more heavily onto his elbows. Hunches in around himself—and even that feels like it’s an awful lot of effort for Shiro to put in, right now. His insides have frozen over. If he didn’t know better, he’d think that his heart stopped beating. It’s a struggle to keep breathing, a struggle not to dig his nails into his palm, and a struggle not to get up and walk away.

Somehow—not entirely with Shiro’s permission—his mouth bites out, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Uh, okay? But you _know_ that, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ isn’t the same thing as an _actual apology_—”

“Yes. I do know that.” Huffing, Shiro clasps his hands together again. He can only grip himself so tightly, which is infinitely better than the risk of drawing blood. Licking his lips, he needs a moment to make up his mind—then, he looks toward Lance while telling him, “But I also know that I had reasons for leaving all of you out of the decision-making process, _and_ out of the ensuing weight loss process—”

“But what _were_ they, then? Because all I’ve got is a bunch of crazy ideas that I really, _really_ hope aren’t true—and _seriously_?” Lance makes a heated, not-quite-whining sound, as if it’s taking him an incredible amount of effort to keep from screaming and probably earning them a noise complaint. “What kind of Shiro came home if you really feel like you couldn’t have talked to us about this big thing that you were doing for yourself?”

“If that’s the definition that we’re working with? Then, the kind of Shiro who came home? Was exactly the same one who left—”

“Then, what does that even _mean_? Because I’m at a total loss, okay?”

Why Shiro keeps hoping for these deep breaths to help is beyond him. Maybe this is becoming some self-soothing reflex, like when Keith’s had a bad day and he needs to stim himself into a somewhat calmer state before he has a meltdown.

Granted, it’s a self-soothing reflex that offers Shiro no relief—but the important thing is that he keeps looking at Lance. His skin might crawl like he has insects trapped underneath it. He might feel nauseated, as if he’ll start projectile vomiting in the next twenty seconds, but he makes himself meet Lance’s eye.

“It means that I left you all out of my process because _precedent_ said that none of you would understand. I didn’t talk to you about what I was doing because _your previous behaviors_ led me to believe that I couldn’t talk to you about any of this.” Choking down a sigh, Shiro pushes his glasses back up his nose. “Because anytime I tried to talk this before Lotor and I went to California? All of you took it back to my appearance, as if that was the only possible reason for me to hate being fat—”

“Okay, but _come on_! Are you seriously gonna try to tell me that you _didn’t care_ about being _hot_ by those stupid, boring standards—”

“No, Lance, I’m not going to tell you that. Of course some part of me wanted to look better—just like how your skincare routine? Sure, it helps you calm down and manage your anxiety.” Shiro arches an eyebrow, silently daring Lance to lie to him. “But you and I both know that you also love the glow it puts in your cheeks.”

Pouting, Lance sinks in his chair and lets his long, skinny legs sprawl out where they will. Toggling the fidget cube’s joystick, he grumbles, “Yeah, but I don’t pin my entire sense of self-worth on whether or not my _skin_ looks pretty.”

“And I don’t actually pin all of mine on my weight. Which you would _know_ if you’d ever _really_ listened to me about this—”

“Well, I’m _sorry_ that you didn’t want to listen to any of our body positivity stuff—”

“That’s only part of my complaint here—”

“Oh really, Shirito?” Lance squawks, doing a convincing impersonation of a morally outraged cockatiel. “‘Cause this all sure sounds an awful lot like you being a _brat_ because you didn’t like us telling you that you had value as a person when you were fat.”

“What I didn’t _appreciate_ was being treated like my only problem? Was that I didn’t like the way I looked. When I—”

“When you used to talk about all of this? It sure as Hell _sounded_ like it was about that!” Lance runs his thumb over the fidget cube’s worry stone. “Whenever any of this came up? You sounded like, ‘Oh, I’m so fat and disgusting, I’m so gross because of how much I weigh, who would ever want a guy as big as me.’ Y’know, aside from Lotor, and _Maurice_, and that Adam guy you dated back in high school, and _Keith_, and all those dudes who hit on you at that sex weekend Maurice took you and Lotor to—”

“See, you going on like this? Is making me feel like I was _right_.” Shiro doesn’t mean to snarl. He doesn’t mean to narrow his eyes so much that Lance pales and shrinks into his seat. But still, he explains, “The way that the entire Gang has acted toward me since I got back? Makes me feel like I was right about everyone _except_ for Keith and Ryou. It makes me feel like you all care more about what you want _for me_ than about my very real problems—”

“What _problems_, though? You were _fine_!” Glaring at Lance makes him swallow thickly. “…Weren’t you?”

“Literally _why_ would you assume that?”

“I mean? Hunk and Ryou are fine? Zethrid’s fine. They’re all big too, right? And it’s not like…”

Whining softly, Lance waves his hands around in front of his face. He’s searching for the words that he wants, and he is getting absolutely nowhere slowly. God, there’s something to be said for patience, but watching Lance go on like this is grating Shiro’s last gay nerve—

“The whole concept of ‘healthy at any size’—”

“Yeah! That’s what I’m going for. Because assuming bigger people are unhealthy—”

“Isn’t always right, no. You’re correct about that. Hunk, Ryou, and Zethrid are all great examples of how you can be big and healthy.” But after three deep breaths, the only thing that Shiro’s managed is sighing, exactly like he’s been trying to avoid. Ducking his chin, he murmurs, “Are you serious about wanting to know what kinds of problems I had? Wanting to understand?”

Although Lance considers that question, he ultimately nods.

Which leaves Shiro trying not to tremble, forcing himself to keep breathing, and grasping at straws to find the right words. Whatever he can say to make sense of things in a way that Lance will even remotely _get_. Worse, Shiro needs to do it without upsetting himself too badly—or, God forbid, upsetting _Lance_ enough that he realizes how much better everyone deserves, and that he never wants to fix this, and then goes to Keith and tells him that Shiro is just irreparably broken, so why doesn’t Keith find somebody better already—

“You know how it feels when you look at Ryou and Allura?” Shiro’s mouth blurts out before his brain can make him shut up and keep it quiet. He digs his nails into his palm but he can’t stop this now: “The way that your pulse races? And your chest tightens up? And you think that you might pass out because your heart is flapping around so hard that it could break out of your rib-cage, and you can’t even breathe? And it feels like you’ve got a hummingbird’s heart because it’s going so fast, except it’s pounding so hard that you can hear it in your ears?”

Lance looks… pretty lost. At least he nods, pretending he follows. “But I didn’t ask you how you feel about _Keith_—”

“I’m not talking about Keith—”

“It _sounds_ like you’re talking about your boyfriend, _bonito_—”

“Except I’m not. I wish I were, but…” Shiro swallows thickly. Uncurls his fist, if mostly because Keith would be upset if he took this into a full-on backslide. “That’s how it used to feel for me _most of the time_. Sometimes, it was because I tried to walk for too long. Or what my body thought of as too long. Other times, it happened because I tried to push myself too hard at something—to keep up with you and Keith and Pidge. To carry the laundry up from the basement. To stay on my feet at Pride, that one year, and after it took so much to actually get myself there—”

“But I thought you went looking for seats ‘cause you wanted to get away from those dudes who were heckling you and Hunk?” A shake of the head gets Lance to make a tight, whining noise, laden down with enough concern to choke a horse. “Shiro, are you—”

“Sometimes, I used to get that feeling because of trying to have _sex_, okay?” Admitting this makes Shiro’s cheeks flush hot. Makes him wish that he could bury himself in the nearest graveyard and never come out. “Sex can kill you anyway, even if you’re healthy. What it does to the body—the stuff you need to put yourself through in order to have it—everything that it does to your heart, your lungs, your brain—you could have a _seizure_ from sex, if your brain isn’t in the right—Hell, orgasms probably only feel good because, from an evolutionary standpoint? They _need_ to. Because otherwise, we’d never—”

“Shiro, you’re starting to sound like Pidge. What were you saying about the other stuff? About _you_ and how you—”

“Right. Me. I’m not trying to run from telling you, or—” Shiro cuts himself off with a sharp inhale. He should be able to pull himself together—but he doesn’t remember where his voice is. Not until Lance’s hand slips onto his back, brushing his hand in small, soft circles between Shiro’s shoulder-blades. “You know the all-night diner? The one a couple blocks away? The only place whose strawberry milkshakes can hold a candle to Hunk’s?”

Giving Shiro a gentle pat, Lance tells him, “I already know about how some of the waitstaff used to treat you and Keith. And the other patrons. I mean, how many times did I ever have to see—”

“Not what I mean. Valid point. Maybe something I’d say on any other day, but…” More for himself than Lance, Shiro shakes his head. Doesn’t make himself feel any more capable of getting through this conversation. Doesn’t make him stop wondering if he shouldn’t ask Lance to get his Xanax. Doesn’t keep his throat from choking out a wobbling little noise that might want to be a sob, but Shiro doesn’t want to let it— “You _know_ that you can walk there, right? If you want to go over there, you don’t need to worry about whether or not you can _make it_?”

“Not unless I’m sick or something. But what does that—”

“I didn’t have that kind of guarantee before. Sometimes, I could make it just fine. Sometimes, I _did_. But other times…” About the only reason that Shiro keeps breathing? Is the firmness as Lance presses that palm into his back. “Some days, I couldn’t even think about going all the way there without my knees fighting me. And protesting. Because I was carrying around too much for them. Too much pressure on my joints—and I had other things going on with them, so the weight only made it work. Trying to walk to the diner, some nights? Made them creak like that floorboard under your bed where Ryou keeps his lock-box—”

“How d’you know about—wait, duh—fuck, twins, right—and your stuff’s in there. Of course he told you—I’m sorry, keep going—”

“Other days, I’d get winded by the time we made it to the hostess’s stand. Let alone getting to a table. Because I couldn’t fit in any of the booths, not comfortably. I’d flop out on the other side from Keith and feel like I was gonna faint. Because I was trying so hard to keep breathing. Except I couldn’t calm down, because what if this time, I finally broke one of the stupid chairs. They always groaned and whined about me sitting in them, but what if they finally… I just…”

Sucking in a breath, Shiro vaguely wishes that he still had Hanahaki. If he did, then he’d have a reason for wincing, how he does. Some reason other than the pang that jerks and twists around the deepest pit of his chest. Other than the way his body suddenly doesn’t feel right—doesn’t feel like _his own _— Shiro’s skin crawls, and squirms, and wriggles—gooseflesh pricks up along his arms and the back of his neck… Every hair on his body might be standing on end. Shiro might’ve gotten hit with a jolt of static electricity… Some invisible monster might be holding a magical taser directly above his heart—except he’d be flailing more in that case, right? He’d be in more pain—and he wouldn’t feel like breathing’s completely beyond him—

All of that would be so much better than this. Better than sucking in breaths and still feeling so dizzy that it’s a miracle he doesn’t hit the table. Better than inhaling deeply and still feeling like he’ll pass out at any minute. Better than hearing Lance call his name—_“Shiro? …Shiro? …_**_Bonito_**_, hey, can you hear me? …Shirito, what’s going on?” _— and only dimly recognizing himself as the Shiro who Lance wants to get in touch with—

“Shiro, man?” Lance kneads his fingertips along Shiro’s spine. “Please, do you want me to go get your Xanax—”

“No, Lance. I’m… I’m not _fine_? But I can get through it. I just need to—”

“Are you sure? ‘Cause it’s okay if you need that. And you’re kinda looking like you might—”

“The diner isn’t even a quarter-mile from here, Lance,” Shiro murmurs, barely managing to keep himself from mumbling. Barely managing to keep himself more or less upright. “But my lungs weren’t strong enough. I couldn’t catch my breath enough to get through walking a couple _stupid blocks_ to get there. Sometimes, I had to—Keith would need to help me—God, he was so _skinny_, and _tiny_, I could’ve _crushed him_, and he would need to practically _carry me_ there, just because he wanted a burger and I didn’t want to let him go alone. Especially if he wanted a fix in the middle of the night—”

“Then why didn’t you _tell him_ that you felt like that? He wouldn’t have done any—”

“I _did_ tell him, sometimes! Plenty of times. Way more than my fair share, we just…” Another sharp inhale shocks into Shiro. Shudders into him and doesn’t let Shiro feel any less like dead-weight. Any less like a _burden_— “So many times, Keith wanted to go out. But he didn’t. Because I didn’t feel up to it. I didn’t feel well enough. And you know how, when you get like—y’know, the way—sometimes, when you’re not feeling the best about yourself—and then you feel like you’re holding Allura and Ryou back?”

Lance gives Shiro a sound that’s like the vocal equivalent of a nod. “Except I’m never _really_ holding them back, right? That’s what they say. And it’s what Hunk says. And it’s what you, and Ulaz, and everybody says—”

“Because you _aren’t_ holding them back. Not really. They don’t want you thinking that because it isn’t true, it’s not—” Shiro gasps. His head feels empty, save his pulse, echoing around the void between his ears. “They’re _obviously_ still doing what they want, and still going after what they want, and still doing everything that they can with their lives and their potential.”

Flopping forward, Shiro catches himself. Shoves his face into his palms. Digs his fingertips into the bridge of his nose and silently wishes that the pressure would do more to make him feel better. Or at the very least, he wishes he could feel something other than his head trying to disappear. Trying to force its way off his shoulders because he’s pinning it down, forcing it to stay in a position that it doesn’t want to be in because why _would_ it—

“Shiro? Please, we can stop if you want. I’m sorry, I didn’t want to push you like—”

“No, Lance!” Shiro’s hand smacks into the table. But the noise it makes is dull, and soft, and it barely even registers. “We’ve come this far already. I can’t back out now. If we’re _really_ doing this, then I need you to understand—”

“Then at least let me get you your Xanax!”

“Look: No one wants you to feel like you’re dead-weight on Ryou and Allura. Because you _aren’t_. Just like you aren’t holding them back—”

“That’s not what I was saying, Shiro—”

“Except I _was_ holding Keith back, the way that I was. Nobody would _tell_ me so. No one wanted to let me believe it. You all had your hearts in the right places and I couldn’t let myself be mad because you only wanted what you thought was best for me. But, come on, _seriously?_” The laugh that bursts out of Shiro’s throat is so cold and hard that he flinches from hearing it. “What else do you call it when you love somebody and you _know_ that they’d be able to do so much more with themself—with their life, with everything they are—if they didn’t feel like they needed to look after you? Keith couldn’t even go to the _diner_ sometimes. Because of _me_—”

“But he _chose_ not to go those times, didn’t he? He could’ve gone, he? That’s all kinds of—oh, don’t look at me like that, I have a point, okay? This is just like in the first _Captain America_ movie!” Lance goes dead quiet until Shiro manages to look over at his broad, hopeful grin. His lips wobble like a drunk girl at a party, ready to keel over into the nearest wall, and Lance looks like something inside him is only five seconds off from shattering. “It’s like when they think that Bucky’s dead, and Steve is sad about his boyfriend, right? And he blames himself for everything that happened. But Peggy tells him to respect Bucky’s choices. ‘Cause he could’ve backed out of the mission, but he didn’t, so he must have thought that Steve was worth dying for?”

Shiro laughs again. He tastes the bitterness of it on his tongue. “What does that have to do with me and Keith?”

“Maybe you feel like you were holding Keith back,” Lance explains, voice trembling with a need for Shiro to understand him. “Maybe you feel like you chained him to you. But he did stuff without you. He still does. You don’t actually force him to do anything, and you wouldn’t do that to him. So, if he stayed back with you instead of going to the diner? Then, he chose to do that. Which means that you can’t say you were holding him back without, like, totally _not_ allowing Keith the dignity of his choice, right? Which is bad? Am I making sense or does this sound completely crazy?”

Listening to Lance talk… His voice drags Shiro down into the moment. Lance’s spritely tenor, brighter than sunshine, pulling Shiro out of his head—out of the realm of infinite possibilities, all of them equally terrible—and back into his body. Into the here-and-now. The _real_.

Slowly but surely, Shiro’s breaths come more deeply. More evenly. They fill him up. Expand his chest, pushing his lungs to their limits.

Dimly, he thinks he feels a twist of pain. But it flares up, so quick and hot, then fades away—he must have imagined it. Made it up in his own head for… He doesn’t know, some unfathomable, stupid reason. Oxygen floods his body, at any rate. His heart slows down… Stops racing like it’s trying to outrun a stampede… His body sags so low, so close to the table, that the muscles in his back squeal in protest, whine about him flexing them like this—

“Shiro?” Lance’s voice is softer than his hand on Shiro’s shoulder. “We’re gonna move over to the couch, okay?”

A quick nod, then Lance peels Shiro up off the table. Maybe he has an easier time of it than he should, maybe not. Shiro can’t tell. All the jumbled thoughts that he had—messed up, tangled, and rushing through his head, elbowing each other around with no regard for anything—they’ve all evaporated. Dissipated into the air, along with Shiro’s ability to fight as Lance guides him to the sofa.

He doesn’t let himself lean on Lance too much. At the very least, Shiro can move his own limbs and do it on his own power. He can carry his own weight. He worked his ass off so that he _wouldn’t_ need to make anybody haul him around like such a hopeless bag of bricks. Not that Lance says anything like that—but Shiro _feels_ it. That’s on him, though. Not on Lance. Worrying his fingers through his white fringe, Shiro tells himself that Lance isn’t doing this. That Lance doesn’t think he’s dead-weight.

With one hand on each of Shiro’s shoulders, Lance nudges him into sitting. As a deep breath jolts into him, Shiro wilts into the cushions. Part of him wants to burrow into them—but most of him feels like that’s asking for too much effort. Way too much energy. If the couch would get with the program and swallow him whole, then that would be ideal. Stop making his issues into other people’s problems. Put Shiro out of everyone else’s misery—

_Snap!_

Cutting into that thought—as if he can tell what’s going on in Shiro’s head—Lance snaps his fingers.

Once he has Shiro’s attention, he says, “I’m gonna make us some tea, okay?”

Shiro nods. Can’t think of anything else to do. Or say.

“And for the record, Shirito?” Lance smiles. “You _are not_ dead-weight.”

“Wait, did I… Was I, like… Did you—”

“Yes, you said those things out loud instead of keeping them in your head. But hey…” He shrugs and it’s almost pleasant. Almost like things are back to their previous normal, the reality where Lance and Shiro can stand to be around each other. “I can’t judge you or your filter, right? Considering how often I don’t have a filter, either?”

With a breathy, obviously fake laugh, Lance flounces off toward the kitchen. When he comes back, he’s claimed the _Finding Nemo_ mug for himself. He sets it on the coffee-table, then curls Shiro’s hands around the mug with an old promotional photo of Leonard Nimoy and Bill Shatner as Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, respectively. Although the tea hasn’t even begun to steep enough, Shiro takes a few deep whiffs of the warm, leafy smell. Blessedly, that steadies his nerves a bit more than simply breathing did. When it’s ready, the tea will no doubt end up helping with that, too—but it needs some time to come into its own.

Once his mug’s sitting next to Lance’s, Shiro sighs and curls both legs up to his chest. He nuzzles at his knees, scraping his cheek against the denim and vaguely wondering why this, of all things, should have any positive effect on his calm. Or on his mood more generally. Or on anything. Sure, his breaths still shiver more than Shiro likes—but he doesn’t flinch when Lance squeezes his shoulder. Doesn’t even tense up.

“You doing okay, _bonito_?” Lance forces a small smile, and Shiro appreciates the effort.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro murmurs, and shakes his head at Lance’s protests that anxiety disorders are always a pain in the neck. “Not for the Xanax… Well. Partly for the Xanax, but…” Shiro slips his hands past his glasses’ lenses and scrubs at his eyes. “I mean, everything else. For the other stuff.”

“Think you can go back to _talking_ about the other stuff?” When Shiro nods, Lance sighs. “Okay, ‘cause… I get that you feel bad emotionally about what you were saying? Like, it doesn’t sound _great_, health-wise? But the bigger problem sounds like your _feelings_, which isn’t…”

Lance trails off when Shiro holds up a hand.

“Think about how it feels when you get _really_ sick,” Shiro tells him, voice coming out cracked, and dry, and strangled—but at least it’s coming out. “Think how it feels when you’re congested, and everything feels heavy. When you can’t catch your breath because your lungs aren’t pulling in enough air, and even moving takes too much effort. Are you picturing that?”

Thankfully, keeping the hand up keeps Lance quiet. Without running off at the mouth, he nods.

Swallowing thickly, Shiro clamps his other hand down on his knee. “That’s how I felt _all the time_, Lance.” _Okay, I’ve come this far. I can keep going. I can do this. Not even _**_can_**_, not that small, I _**_need_**_ to do this— _“Except I wasn’t sick. Not in the way that you were. When I got sick in that way—like, I was lucky that my immune system is so good and I almost never got that kind of sick. Because I was already so badly off, it used to knock me flat on my back. Then, unlike when you come down with something, I couldn’t take some DayQuil, drink some tea, and wait for things to clear up.”

God, Shiro should be looking Lance in the eye instead of staring at the coffee-table. But trying to lift his chin, Shiro only manages to prop it on his knees. Curling one hand up in his jeans, he blinks at the wall as if it’s going to give him any answers. Or any extra motivational shots in the arm.

Which is like waiting for a boulder to edit one of Keith’s clips, when it all comes down to dust. Theoretically, according to Sven’s obnoxious, bug-eyed boyfriend, the principle of infinitude means that there exist several timelines and realities in which the boulder helps Shiro out. But in this reality, it would most likely stare at him in unmoved silence, refusing to contribute and probably wondering why Shiro expects it to do anything.

Shiro chokes down a sigh. “I couldn’t wait for things to clear up because instead of being sick? I was fat. Not big and healthy, either, like Ryou, and Hunk, and Zethrid. I was more like a heart attack waiting to happen.” Another sigh tries to burst out of him, but once more, he holds it back. “I was a prisoner in my own body, Lance. No, I didn’t like the way I looked—I _hated_ the way I looked—but even more than that, I hated all the things that I couldn’t do without feeling like I was gonna die. Hated how I held _myself_ back. Weighed _myself_ down. I hated…”

A deep inhale. Shiro’s lungs try their damnedest to shudder. To make him hack up a death rattle.

On his next breath, they do the same. They shiver and flap against his ribs like they’ve got a mind of their own and a very pressing desire to make Shiro humiliate himself. Make him sound like he can’t even keep himself together anymore. As if all the work that he put into fixing his body doesn’t matter because he’s still a wreck. Still falling apart.

When Lance’s hand finds its way to Shiro’s shoulder, though, his lungs calm down. Let him draw in air enough.

“I hated the way I felt in my own skin,” Shiro confesses, and he ought to look at Lance. But dragging these words out of himself is taking so much effort that he can’t keep his eyes open. Hugging his shins, Shiro lets his white fringe flop over his face. “Hated working so hard to _fight off_ my suicidal impulses, only to feel like my _body_ would kill me anyway. All because I put everyone else’s comfort ahead of my own. Quit fighting back against you all, gave up my own decisions. Didn’t make the choices that I wanted to make. _Knew_ that I _needed _to make, so I—”

“But we would’ve _understood_ that!” Lance’s grip tightens on Shiro’s shoulder. His hand fixes itself to Shiro, all but outright begging Shiro to agree with whatever Lance has to say on behalf of himself and the entire Gang. “Sure, we _thought_ it was all about your looks—but if you’d explained that it was about your _health_—”

“I _tried_ to explain that to you, though. I tried to explain that to _everybody_. D’you know what I remember hearing, every time I opened my mouth?”

Shiro holds up, in case Lance wants to guess. He doesn’t, though—which Shiro can’t rightly hold against him—so he huffs.

In a tone so flat and removed that it freezes his insides, he rattles off, “‘Don’t be so dramatic, Shiro. Don’t pull our legs about this, Shiro. Don’t carry all that stuff from high school around with you forever, Shiro. You need to get over it, forget everything that happened and move on. You aren’t all the awful things that people call you, Kashi. You need to learn how to see the value in yourself, and you can _only_ do that if you _don’t_ lose any weight because we say so. We decided this for you, based on what _we_ want for you, not on anything that _you_ say’—”

“Shiro, please—we didn’t even—not like, really—nobody _ever _meant that! You _know_—”

“‘Come on, Shiro, stop kidding to yourself about this health garbage,’” he goes on, grabbing up another handful of denim the way Ojiisan used to grab up strands of worry-beads. “‘We all know you’re grasping at straws, here. Making up excuses. Justifications that you don’t think we can argue with because your only _real_ problem is that you care too much about the number on the scale and the opinions of people who don’t even _matter_.’”

None of which, strictly speaking, is nearly as untrue as Shiro wishes that it were. All of his friends and loved ones had points, any time they brought up the credence that he gives to other people’s opinions of him. Getting called out on it by multiple therapists, in all likelihood, means that Shiro loses any right he might’ve had to argue with anyone about that. Even if he did have the right, there’d be no point because there’s no convincing case that he can make in his own defense—not really.

“But that was _never_ what we wanted you to feel,” Lance insists. “We only wanted you—”

“‘There’s nothing wrong with your _body_, Shiro, only with your mind.’” God, Shiro wishes that his knuckles would snap through his skin already. Stop tormenting him and get the foreplay over with. But he keeps going: “‘You only need to fix your outlook. Stop caring how much you weigh or what size clothes you need to buy. Fix your opinions of yourself. Stop basing them on how much your enormous thighs jiggle, or how big around your flabby waistline’s gotten, or whether or not you’re morbidly obese. Stop _caring_ so much about getting winded by doing _simple_ things. Why even bother _trying _to drop the weight anyway, you _know_ your diets never last’—”

“Come _on_, Shiro! You _know_ that we never wanted you to—”

“‘Honor _our_ opinions more than your own because how could you possibly know what’s best for yourself. That’s why your diets always backfire. Why you always end up bigger than you started, when you’re on one.’” Something thick and hot wells up behind Shiro’s Adam’s apple, and swallowing thickly doesn’t clear it out. If only he were getting sick instead of being an emotional disaster. “‘I mean, honestly, Shiro? Why _should_ you pay attention to your own opinions? You want to lose weight when that could make you finally develop a full-blown eating disorder’—”

“Well, are we _wrong_ for worrying about that? Or about _you_—”

“No, you weren’t. Whatever I used to say about you being wrong? I take it back, because you _weren’t_. No matter how much I wanted you to be.” Hand curled up, boa constrictor-tight, in his jeans, Shiro forces himself to turn his head. To look Lance in the eye, so that they can have no questions or doubts between them about this. “I’m sorry. For thinking that you were all wrong to worry about that. One of the things I’ve realized in the process of losing all the weight I did? Is exactly how right you really were.”

Lance’s eyes go wide. His brow scrunches up and his mouth falls open, wordlessly. He looks like Shiro’s slapped him clean across the face, rather than apologizing. But his hand stays on Shiro’s shoulder. The fingers go slack, but it’s as if Lance is rooted to the spot. As if he _can’t_ move. Or perhaps he doesn’t _want_ to. If he’s worried that Shiro’s going to pull away or maybe disappear on him—

“Know how I realized that?” Shiro waits, but Lance doesn’t even manage to shake his head. “I put it together because, since Lotor and I got back? I have been _struggling_. Fighting an uphill battle against the exact same feelings and impulses that all of you were worried about, before. Even though I worked on all of this—on more than just diet and exercise—in California. Even though I _know_ that starving myself was part of how I got so huge in the first place—y’know, ironically and because the universe completely _hates_ me—”

“Then why didn’t you tell any of us about _this_?!” If his voice were louder, Lance would be squawking. Instead, Shiro can barely make out what’s coming from Lance’s mouth as he says, “We only want you to be _happy_, Shiro. Happy and _healthy_. For _real_ healthy. And if you’ve been feeling like that, then why wouldn’t you—”

“I’ve told Ryou, and Keith, and Lotor about it—”

“And the rest of us are _what_ to you, then? Do we not even—”

“The _rest_ of you have been telling me that I’m not myself anymore. After everything you used to say about my weight not mattering? About the number on the scale _not making a difference_?” Shiro narrows his eyes. “You lot turned around and decided that, if I’m anything but the fat Shiro you remember, then actually, my weight _does_ matter. Makes a _huge_ difference to you, now. Even huger than I used to be—”

“But you didn’t even look like—”

“I didn’t look that bad? As ever, I respectfully disagree with your take on the situation.” With a sigh, Shiro flips his white fringe off his face. “Which brings us back to the things you guys used to say that made me feel like I couldn’t tell you what I was doing. Things like, ‘We say that you don’t _need_ to change for anyone or any reason’—”

“But you wanted to change for stupid—and we _never_ said it exactly like—”

“‘If you _want_ to change, then you _shouldn’t_ because _we_ know what’s best for you better than you do’—”

“If we thought you _really_ had good reasons, then we would’ve been more—”

“‘What about how _we_ feel, Shiro? What about _our_ thoughts on your body? And _our_ thoughts about your health’—”

“You’re our _friend_, man! Our _brother_! You—we—but come on, we were only _worried about_—”

“‘What about the things that _we_ like you doing? What about the things that _we_ want? Who cares about what you’—”

“We never, _ever_ meant for _anything_ to sound like—”

“‘Why do you even _want_ to be skinny in the first place? Why do you _care_ about fitting in with _normal_ people or with their standards’—”

“Were we _wrong_ about that? None of us in the Gang is exactly—”

“‘Normal people who make you feel terrible don’t matter. All they’ve ever done is police your body and try to tell you who and what to be. Sort of _exactly_ like what we’re doing—except it’s _okay_ when _**we’re**_ the ones doing it, because we want you to stay _fat_. Which is different and morally superior because we _say_ it is’—”

“We wanted you to _love yourself_—”

“According to _your own_ definition of that!”

“We only wanted you to see the value in—to see yourself as _good_, and how much you—”

“‘Anyway, it doesn’t _really_ matter because this isn’t a _discussion_, Shiro.’” Letting his eyes slip shut again, Shiro coughs up a dry, bitter laugh. “‘You don’t get to have a say in this, as far as we’re concerned. We love you _exactly_ as you are—at least, right _now_. We prefer you as this huge, massive, lumbering tub of lard. This enormous, irreparable fat-ass with a ticking time-bomb for a body. Why can’t you just be _happy_ as the Gang’s biggest friend’—”

“More like, ‘Why don’t you think you _matter_? Why can’t you see how you’re amazing, whether you’re fat or not?’”

“That might have been what you all intended to say,” Shiro murmurs, tucking the white fringe behind his ear. He shoves his black bangs back, too. Doesn’t matter that Lance can’t see his face or that he can’t see Lance’s; Shiro needs to do something with his hands. “What all of it sounded like to me? Was you guys saying, ‘We don’t want you to change, Shiro, which means you _never should_. Not even if you want it. Not even if it’s for your health. _Never_.’”

“But with the way you used to talk? It always _sounded_ like it was about your _looks_—”

“Not like any of you bothered asking me, though, was it. Or _listening_ to anything else I said.”

Lance gulps audibly, and knowing him, he’s likely going pale. Might even feel nauseated. Shiro might take comfort in this, if he could remotely fake his way through pretending to be stable. He wouldn’t _enjoy_ the fact that Lance doesn’t feel so well. He wouldn’t _enjoy_ having made one of his (former?) best friends feel so sick by merely talking. But some horrible part of Shiro wouldn’t mind because at least he wouldn’t be the only miserable person in this conversation.

Except none of this makes him feel any better for having hacked up the memories of those old debates. Doesn’t give Shiro any kind of better time. He worries one hand up and down the seam of his jeans. Drags his fingers along the denim and thick, knotted-feeling lumps that keep his pants together. He’s alive. He is sitting in his apartment, on his sofa, beside his friend. It’s March 22nd, 2018. His name is Takashi Shirogane, and he is alive—

“What you all _said_ wasn’t the worst part, either.” Inhaling deeply, Shiro props his chin back on his curled-up knees. “Everything else about the situation? Everything else you all told me? It made me feel like I couldn’t tell you what I was doing in California or else you’d try to stop it. Like you’d all pool the cash to send Keith and Ryou out to Los Angeles to stop me—”

Lance whines like a man who desperately wishes that he were not whining. “Okay, I get that, now? And I’m sorry that we ever made you feel like that. But Shiro, come on—you can’t act like you didn’t—for a _year-and-a-half_—”

“It also felt like you thought that I _couldn’t_ do it. Which is the worst part that I meant.”

Blinking at the wall makes Shiro’s head spin. Makes his stomach lurch as if he’s going to be sick. He shuts his eyes again as he adds on, “Everything you guys told me? Made me feel like you thought that I was too fat and weak… Like I didn’t _really_ have the willpower. Like I’d never learn better, just keep repeating the same stupid cycles that I’d put myself through for so long. Doing it over and over and over again until I dropped dead early—which I wanted to _prevent._”

He sighs, shakes his head. “It felt like I needed to believe in myself because none of you did. Either you’d be angry with me for defying what The Gang wanted by losing weight? Or you’d laugh yourselves sick about how I’d never _really_ slim down how I _wanted_—”

“But _eighteen months_, Shiro! A little more than that, even! Over a year-and-a-fucking-half!”

Getting thwacked in the knee is a bit like getting hit by a mild breeze. Still, a few rounds of it make Shiro look at Lance.

Lance… looks more than a little worse for wear. No, he isn’t crying. But he’s got tears teasing at the corners of his eyes. He has his mouth screwed up in the way that Lance always gets when he feels like somebody’s ignoring him. His lips tremble. So does the hand that he whacks against Shiro’s calf. All up, Lance is doing his best impersonation of a rubber band about to snap off of someone’s fingers and crack into someone else’s forehead.

“What I’ve been _trying_ to get at, man?” Huffing, Lance drags his quivering fingers through his hair. “Is that a year-and-a-half is a pretty damn long time to spend _not telling any of us_ what you were doing—except for Ryou. But you didn’t even tell _him_ of your own free will, and you swore him to secrecy—”

“The fact that he _agreed_ to said secrecy? Should probably give you a few clues about how serious this problem was—”

“Alright, fine! You guys saw a serious problem that the rest of us didn’t. Ryou wanted to respect your wishes and everything. You wanted to lose weight without us trying to stop you. I get it, I got it, _that makes sense_.” Which doesn’t stop Lance from hunching his shoulders and sulking at Shiro like an irritated kitten—but that makes perfect sense when he tacks on, “I wish that it _didn’t_ make so much sense? But… I get it. And I’m sorry that we made you feel like you couldn’t trust us.”

Although Shiro knows that he should say something—at the very least, he should tell Lance that he accepts the apology—he’s got nothing. Only a blank space and distant buzzing in the cavity between his ears. A yawning void where his mind belongs. Thankfully, a smile flashes across Lance’s face when Shiro nods. Almost gets him back to looking the way he normally does, all bright and cheerful and eager to be around people because Lance loves people only slightly more than he loves attention.

“But I still take issue with _how long _you spent doing this,” he says, folding his arms up over his chest and slouching against the cushion as if he means to dig himself a hole. “Seriously, did you even think about our reactions at all? How we might take any of this? If we could’ve seen you getting happier? Seen the gradual process in action and _known_ that you were doing it all healthily and everything—”

“Would it honestly have changed anything? Can you look me in the eye and tell me that you would’ve understood in the way you’re—”

“Nobody’s ever gonna know that now. Because _you_ decided to cut us out. Because _you_ never updated us on _any_ of this. _That’s_ what I feel betrayed by here. You didn’t even _think_—” Cutting himself off, Lance lets himself go slack. “Unless you _did_ think about how we might react to going from a hundred to zero all at once like this—”

“Four-hundred-and-thirty-five to two-fifteen, actually—”

“Not the point! I’m talking about how maybe you _did _put thought into how we’d handle things, but you just didn’t think we’d _care_.”

“I definitely thought about how you’d all react.” Carefully, Shiro uncurls his legs and reaches for his mug. “I thought, on one hand, that I wanted to surprise you guys. Part of me felt spiteful about it—like, either, ‘Oh, they didn’t believe in me, I’ll show them’ or, ‘It’s really none of their business anyway’—but mostly, I was scared. Because after Ryou yelled at me—and after some other stuff—thinking about breaking the news to you while I was still in the process of getting where I wanted to be? Made me a nervous wreck—”

“Yeah, because that’s _so_ much different from how you usually feel. What about the other hand?”

“On the other hand?” Shiro quirks his shoulders. Sips his tea. “I thought there was a chance that I’d been wrong. A chance that _maybe_, you guys had meant everything you told me about my weight not mattering. So, you’d look past the superficial numbers and just _be happy_ for me—”

“But you didn’t even _look_ like yourself!” While Shiro insistently nurses his drink, Lance groans and thumps something against the couch. Probably his head. “D’you think I’m _joking_ with you? ‘Cause I wouldn’t be the class clown about this, Shiro. When you and Lotor first showed up at the baggage claim—”

“When you nearly knocked me over and pretended not to recognize me—”

“I wasn’t _pretending_ anything, okay?!”

“And I was supposed to know that _how_, exactly? Given your precedent of—”

The next groan comes up from deeper inside of Lance. He muffles a round of mild coughing. It must not be _that_ bad, because once it’s died down, Lance launches into telling Shiro, “Literally, why would I play with you about something like that? That’s not me. I hadn’t seen you for _almost two years_! I missed you, I wanted to see you, and I wanted you to take Keith off my hands ‘cause he was being a quiznakking _nightmare_. But I didn’t notice you at all. Not until you started talking, and then it was like, ‘Where in the double-spanking, cheese-infested monkey Hell is _Shiro_? What kind of body-snatching alien got its ugly, extraterrestrial hands on _my_ friend? Who is this hottie with the eight-pack and why is he fucking _smiling_ at me?! Everything about this feels deeply fucking _wrong_, and what the fuck am I supposed to _do_ in this kinda situation!’”

Vaguely, Shiro wants to ask Lance to calm down before the neighbors call in a noise complaint.

Somewhat less than vaguely, Shiro wants to point out that Lance tacitly implied that “hottie” does not fit into his previous mental definition of, “Shiro,” which significantly undermines everything that he and their other friends used to tell Shiro about how he was perfectly beautiful, despite his former size.

Instead, Lance starts coughing—and it doesn’t die down fast, this time. The coughs keep coming, with no apparent end in sight. With each breath Lance almost-catches, they get deeper and deeper. Harder and harder. They wrack Lance’s skinny body with tremors so fierce, Shiro would swear that he can see them through the fabric of Lance’s shirt. Worse yet, each round of hacking sounds _wet_ and _thick_, like something’s trying to fight its way up and out of Lance—_Oh, for the love of God…_

As soon as Shiro puts things together, Lance spits a heap of black rose petals up into his hands.

Groaning softly, Shiro lets his head loll back onto cushions. “Jesus Christ…”

“Sounds about right, yeah.” Lance huffs as though he could lie down for a twenty-five-year nap, and the roll of his eyes is audible. “But I’m not gonna make a move that would mess up what you and Keith have, okay? I mean, now that you’ve mutually gotten your heads out of your asses and actually _have_ anything. This is strictly a platonic case of Hanahaki.”

“You’re dating my _brother_. If you ever hit on me in earnest, why would I hurt you, him, _and_ Keith by telling you anything but, ‘No’?”

“I don’t know! Why wouldn’t you at _least_ document what you did to yourself on social media?”

Shiro furrows his brow at the ceiling. Unhelpfully, it doesn’t have any possible explanations for him. “Why would I have _wanted_ to put that on social media? Posting gym selfies is _tedious_, okay? I mean, I do it anyway. Lotor thinks it’s because I like the attention. I think it’s because I need reminders that all of this is _real_—”

“Wait, what? Why wouldn’t any of it be real?”

“Because part of me can’t believe I actually lost all the weight I did, okay? I’ve spent most of my life overweight. Even spending two years on the process, I just…” Shiro’s shoulders shrug themselves. “I guess you can’t totally outrun feeling like a complete fat-ass. Part of me feels like I could wake up tomorrow and go right back to being huge. Like this was all a dream, and I didn’t put in all the work, and I haven’t even…”

“_Jesus_…” For the first time, Lance sighs as if he actually comprehends what Shiro’s talking about. As if he understands the magnitude of things and how much this means to Shiro. “Are you gonna be offended if I say I get it… because sometimes, I still feel the same way about being with Ryou and Allura?”

Shiro shakes his head. “Either way? Sharing gym selfies—even for the sake of reminding myself that this is _real_? Reminding myself that I _did_ do the work, and lose the weight, and this isn’t all a dream? Posting pictures of my abs or my arms on Instagram makes me feel like such an egocentric _meat-head_—”

“I think the accurate term is, ‘Beefcake,’ Shirito—”

“But if I feel like that now, when I have what Keith and Ryou swear is a good reason for posting this on Instagram? Never mind how I’m finally thin enough that I can exist in public spaces and on the Internet without fear of harassment or getting turned into a godawful meme? Like the one girl who posted one selfie with a bit of self-deprecating humor, then memers made her suicidal?”

“Wait, which girl are you talking about? Because I can think of about five? Maybe eight?”

“The fact that you need to _ask_ which girl I mean? The fact that this happens so often to fat people who dare to exist on the Internet that we need to clarify which instance I mean? That’s a _huge_ part of the problem.” Lifting his head makes Shiro feel like he’s gonna faint—but he _needs_ to look Lance in the eye while asking, “In light of all that, Lance: why would I have _wanted_ to post gym selfies and workout updates online while I was _losing_ all the weight? While I was still to big to be allowed?”

Flapping his hands and arms, Lance lets his rose petals slip out of his hand. They scatter all over the table, floating down like something straight out of a shoujo anime. If Hunk were home, he’d have a conniption about it. He’d make Shiro and Lance clean up everything, then he’d need Shiro to mop the entire floor, all so his OCD would feel perfectly appeased that their apartment isn’t going to become a hub for any _infectious_ germs that Lance might have in addition to his current Hanahaki flare-up.

While Shiro watches a petal drift down to the floor, Lance bursts into his reverie, proclaiming, “I _dunno_, okay? Not when you put it in those kinds of terms? ‘Cause you make it sound like you didn’t want attention like that—”

“That’s exactly why I used those terms. Because I _didn’t_ want that sort of—”

“But that’s what I don’t _get_, Shirito.” The groaning sound that comes out of Lance sound like he might be putting actual thought into this matter. “There are all kinds of Internet celebs who got famous for putting their weight loss online. And some of them have gotten invited to the Oscars, or to be on Rachael Ray’s show, or to join the Screen Actors Guild. They’ve gotten _book deals_ and all kinds of stuff, just from using _Instagram_—”

“I don’t _want_ that attention, Lance. Outside of what I do with Keith? I work _behind_ the camera.”

“But you wanted support and positive reinforcement, though, right? Even from strangers on the Internet? That’s a kind of support—”

“It isn’t _support_. Not _real_ support. Not to me—”

“But it’s people following your progress. Encouraging you and holding you accountable—”

“I learned how to hold _myself_ accountable. While I was still working on that part, the risk of disappointing Lotor did more of a number on me—and provided more motivation—than the risk of disappointing people on the Internet.” Thankfully, another sip of tea gets Shiro through saying, “Going to the gym was enough of an exercise in getting condescended to and gawked at like a circus freak—”

“Wait, like, _what_? People were doing what to you?”

Shiro rolls his eyes. He cringes over this—over him judging Lance like this when he _knows_ that Lance doesn’t know better—but it’ll be fine.

Everything will be fine, as long as Shiro doesn’t sound too harsh while explaining, “When a fat person goes to the gym, they tend to get a few big reactions. First, there are the people who just stare at you because—well, why _wouldn’t_ they stare? You see a four-hundred-thirty-five-pound mountain waddle into the gym, stretching his t-shirt and yoga pants to their absolute limits, and he starts going at the machines or the free-weights? People are like, ‘Well, _that’s _something you don’t see every day.’”

“But why is it any of their—”

“Second, there are the people who snort at you, especially when you show up in January. Coming in around then, people take one look at you and decide that you’re some gargantuan, weak-willed slob who’s only thundering into _their_ gym for the sake of a New Year’s Resolution that you won’t keep a week. But even when you _keep_ coming? Even when the New Year’s rush loses all the skinny people who only want to drop fifteen pounds or get themselves a six-pack or whatever…” Scuffing his foot along the coffee-table, Shiro sighs. “They still believe that about you. Even when you show up at least five days a week, at least thirty minutes every time.”

“Okay, so people are stupid. Why does that mean you couldn’t have gone on Instagram?”

A deep breath and a shake of the head finally do something positive for Shiro’s nerves. Finally make him feel steady enough to tell Lance, “When I first started going? I needed music on my headphones so I could drown out the people snickering. They’ll hold up their own workouts, all just to turn and stare at the huge, fat blob who’s plodding along on the treadmill. Gasping for breath and heaving, even though it’s on one of the lowest settings.”

“I’m sorry, man,” Lance murmurs, running his knuckles down Shiro’s bicep. “That’s so shitty.”

“They aren’t even the worst ones. Sure, they’re exasperating—but at least they might actually heckle you out loud.” His voice goes flat, nearly dead, as Shiro recites some of the things he heard at the gym in LA: “‘Oh man, good thing I already got my reps in on the rower. It’s not gonna last five more minutes with that lard-ass sitting on it’—”

“What the _quiznak_? Are you serious—”

“‘What are _you_ doing here, Tubby? You know the all-you-can-eat buffet is around the corner, right’—”

“Where the fuck did they get off—”

“‘Ha ha, come check it out, Mike. I think somebody got lost. Check the news, the zoo must’ve misplaced a baby elephant’—”

“Holy _shit_, Shiro. How did you and Lotor even make it without—”

“‘You can sweat all you want, Butterball, but it’s never gonna make a difference. Not for _your_ fat ass. How can you let yourself out in public’—”

“Hold the _phone_! People must have heard this. People _other_ than you and Lotor.” When Shiro nods to confirm this, Lance gapes at him and his eyes flare up like he might start frothing at the mouth from sheer, unmitigated rage. “Then why didn’t anybody _do anything_ to help you? Like, I dunno, anything to make them _stop_?”

“Because, Lance. They think fat people deserve everything we—they—we…” Shiro huffs. “You know what I mean, right? Not with the concept, but the whole… I can’t pick whether this is a ‘we’ or a ‘they’? And you understand my problem here?”

Fortunately, Lance does. “But I still don’t get why nobody tried to stop them?”

“It was better than what I got in high school. Same underlying rationale, but…” Kneading his temple, Shiro hopes he can get through this without melting down or having a temper tantrum. Lance is genuinely trying his best right now; he doesn’t deserve to clean up that kind of mess. “No one steps in when a fat person gets harassed because you’re fat, and they assume that it’s your fault—and, in my case, it honestly _was_. Which means you’re _asking_ for people to rip into you like tissue paper—”

“But it _isn’t_ always like that, right? There’s genetics, and diseases, and you and Allura can talk for _hours_ about the politics—”

“Exactly. But none of that matters to these people. They decide that they know what’s what, and that it’s their God-given right to hurt someone else.” Looking at the ceiling as if it might help him (which it doesn’t), Shiro sighs. “Because when somebody makes you feel like garbage for your weight, they’re only pointing out facts. If you can’t handle that reality, then people tell you that it’s _your_ fault. For being weak. For being too sensitive. For not taking any responsibility for yourself, or your own body, or your choices, or your life—”

“That sounds like some grade-A victim-blaming garbage—”

“They’ll tell you that bullies are _probably_ trying to motivate you, even if they do it by calling you a pig with no self-control. Or a baby whale who washed up on the beach. Or a hopeless, jiggly fat-ass who’s torturing everyone in a ten-mile radius by forcing them to look at you—”

“Oh my _god_—”

“Even if what they say makes you feel like you’re trash, and a burden to the people who love you, and too stupid to do anything—”

“Holy _shit_, Shirito—”

“Even when they make you feel like you don’t deserve to be _alive_, much less have love.”

“And other people _let them_ get away with this?”

“All the time. Because even the nice people who don’t believe that harassment is okay? They’re like, ‘Well, if you didn’t want to deal with this, you shouldn’t have existed while fat.’” Shrugging, Shiro lets his hips sag and his head droop back onto the cushions. “All of which sucks to hear, but when people have the decency to heckle you to your face? It means you can go, ‘Hey, I already know what a big, blubber-laden, bloated, hippopotamic land-mass of a person I let myself turn into. I _know_ that I’m enormous, I know that I’m the fattest person you’ve ever seen in real life, I know that I’m completely disgusting and looking at my body makes you want to puke. I’m putting in the work and trying to change that because I can’t stand my own body either. Why can’t you mind your own business’—”

“Shiro?” Lance squeezes Shiro’s arm. “Do you really feel all that stuff about yourself? Or any of the other stuff you’ve said?”

“Can’t remember a time when I didn’t.” He quirks his shoulders. “Why do you think Ryou reserves the right to throw things at me when I start talking like that? You can’t break a negative thought pattern without interrupting it.”

“But then, with all this? Shouldn’t you have _really_ put your process on the Internet?”

“_God_, no. Because that might’ve invited more of the _worst_ kinds of people I had to deal with—”

“You’re talking about people who made you feel like you didn’t deserve to be alive! How could it get worse?”

“All the condescending, patronizing people. That’s how.” Shiro pauses long enough to drain the rest of his tea and hand the mug off to Lance. Pinching at the bridge of his nose, he says, “The ones who see a fat person eating salad, then give you a thumbs up and go, ‘Wow, good for you. Well done.’ Or who see you at the gym and come over before you even _start_. All just to pat you on the back and tell you what a huge inspiration you are. How great it is to see _somebody_ really taking charge of their life. How _amazing_ you are for trying _so hard_ to change. God, look at you go, what a superstar, give ‘em Hell, champ. Pretty soon, you’ll be a _real_ person, like the rest of us with our healthy body fat percentages.”

Pausing, Shiro expects for Lance to cut in with something to say. Something emotional, something snarky, something accidentally brilliant… It could be anything—except it doesn’t come. When Lance only manages a confused, throaty little whine, Shiro pries himself off the couch. He comes back with the fidget cube and hands it over, hoping that giving Lance this outlet back will keep him grounded. Maybe rouse his brain and drag it back from wherever it’s drifted off to.

All this accomplishes is giving Lance a joystick to fiddle with and some buttons to mash.

Shiro sighs. “Do you get _why_ I think those people are the worst out of the bunch?”

“Not even a little bit, Shirito.” As he speaks, Lance doesn’t take his eyes off the joystick. Doesn’t stop jerking it around and barely restrains himself from grunting at it. “‘Cause okay, I get that you don’t like it when strangers touch you? And sometimes you get weird when strangers act any kind of _friendly_? But what you’re saying sounds like them just trying to be _nice_.”

“Fair enough. That’s probably how they see themselves, too.” Crossing his arms over his chest, Shiro shifts his position so he’s facing Lance. “But laced under all those would-be compliments? Are all of these assumptions about what kind of person you are. What kind of person you _must_ be. How much _effort_—that’s such a joke, **_effort_**.” Curling a hand around his elbow, he trails off into a sigh. “They don’t know or care about the pieces of this that take _actual_ effort. _Actual_ work. They presume to know your entire backstory and your motivations, and then they congratulate you for showing up, as though that’s some kind of _accomplishment_—”

“Isn’t it an accomplishment, though? For you, anyway?” Apologetically, Lance smiles and bats his foot at Shiro’s shin. “I don’t mean for fat reasons. Or, well, I guess it would’ve been impacted by those? But, like… With _your_ anxiety? Dealing with that shit must’ve been _Hell_. I would’ve just stayed home, in your shoes.”

“That’s not really what I—” Grumbling, Shiro tugs on his white fringe. “…Actually, Lance? That _is_ a pretty good point.”

Lance beams. “There, see? And the fact that I came up with it instead of Lotor? Even though he had a year-and-a-half to do so? That is _proof_ that you should’ve been putting your progress up on Instagram this entire time. That way, _we_ could’ve followed the updates and gotten used to skinny Shiro _gradually_, while _you_ could’ve gotten the support that you wanted, even if it wasn’t always from us.”

“Maybe that would’ve worked for _you_. But the support you’re talking about? Felt less like support and more like turning myself into a circus freak.”

“I mean, what else are you gonna get, though? If you didn’t want support from your _family_—”

“I _did_ want support from my family. I just didn’t think that any of you would _give it _to me—and so far? You’ve proved me _right_.”

Pursing his lips, Shiro locks his gaze on Lance. He doesn’t mean to get too cold, but that considering Lance shrinks back into the corner where the sofa’s armrest meets the back, Shiro’s intentions probably don’t count for much. They didn’t count for much when he thought that he maybe wouldn’t get in trouble for losing weight and not telling anybody. He’s been telling Lance how The Gang’s intentions didn’t count for much when they thought that they were supporting Shiro and only made him feel weak and alienated, how much strangers’ good intentions only made things worse. Why should Shiro expect anything to make this better?

With a huff like he’s a balloon about to pop, Lance curls his legs up to his chest and plants his feet on a cushion. Resting his chin on his knees, he keeps looking at Shiro, even if he can’t maintain eye-contact. Not that Shiro can blame Lance for the way his eyes dart around, refusing to settle on any one point in particular, much less a point on Shiro’s face. Hell, Lance is doing better than Shiro did, when he needed to look his (maybe? possibly? former? but are they really?) friend in the eye and kept failing to come even halfway close.

“This is just…” Lance heaves a sigh, then winces. “This is such a fucked up mess.”

“It was never supposed to be.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t change the way it _is_.”

“I know it doesn’t. I’m just saying: I never wanted this to be a mess.”

“Yeah, me neither.” Another deep breath. Another sigh—and Lance winces once again. He and Shiro both have that problem, that passive refusal to learn the intended message from things that hurt them. But unlike Shiro, Lance shakes himself around and manages to say, “For what it’s worth, Shiro? I’m sorry that we made you feel that way. And I’m sorry that we made you feel like you couldn’t call us out on what we were doing because we wouldn’t listen anyway, so what was the point in even trying.”

_That is… exactly what I’ve been saying_, Shiro muses, tugging his fingers through his bangs. _But I never wanted you to—_

“And I don’t know, maybe this was the only way that any of us would ever hear what you were saying? We’re never gonna know for sure, at this point—not unless you want to, I dunno, gain the weight back and see—”

“I don’t want that, period.” Shiro grinds the arch of his foot against the coffee-table’s edge. “Besides, we wouldn’t be able to get any accurate data from that. Even if everyone forgot what the point was by the time I was fat enough to try again? There’d be too much chance of subconscious influence—”

“Alright, so we aren’t gonna do anything like that. All you had to say was that you didn’t want it.” Holding up his hands in surrender, Lance gives Shiro a _Look_ so earnest that it makes something hot and sick and painful jerk around inside of Shiro’s chest. “We needed to listen to you more before, right? …And I needed to shut up and stop when you tried to tell me to?”

Trying not to let himself sigh—trying not to wilt too much further into the sofa—Shiro gives Lance a slow nod and a small smile. “Like I told you already: one of the things that I wanted most, especially about the _‘Not My Shiro’ _stuff? Was for you and everyone to just stop.”

“And we should’ve done that, I know that now. We should’ve listened to you and respected all of what you said, and we _should_ have stopped—**_I_** should have stopped. I’m sorry.” Lance nods, more like he’s assuring himself that he can get through this conversation like an adult, instead of running back upstairs and hiding in his, Allura, and Ryou’s bedroom. “And I’m sorry that we hurt you with it—I’m sorry that _I _hurt you with any of those jokes. By going too far—because I did go too far, and maybe I didn’t realize it until now, today? But I went too far, and I’ve been acting like a jerk, and Shiro, _please_, I am so, _so_ sorry. I should’ve listened to you better—I should’ve pulled my head out of my own _ass _— I should’ve realized—”

Lance gasps sharply. So loudly that Shiro wonders if he shouldn’t be wearing earplugs to protect his hearing. Letting one of his hands drop, Lance braces himself on the sofa. His other arm trembles as he forces it to stay up, makes himself hold that hand out toward Shiro’s face. Clearly, he’s intent on keeping Shiro quiet while he’s catching his breath—which isn’t really an unreasonable request, much less one that Shiro objects to any. He had his own turn to rant at Lance about his hurt feelings—if they count more accurately, Shiro’s likely had more than his fair share of turns, at this point—and Lance deserves to get his shot.

Besides, Shiro wants to hear the rest of this apology before letting himself react.

While he waits for Lance to get ready, Shiro wishes that he had more tea to drink but he doesn’t feel like getting up to make any. He uncaps his tube of vaguely Dr. Pepper-flavored chapstick and applies a decent coat of it. He rubs it along his lips, grateful for how smooth they’re feeling. Keith wants to shoot a pretty simple clip when he gets home tonight. Nothing complicated, only weighing and measuring each other, and comparing how much bigger Keith is than Shiro, now—but Keith will probably appreciate not needing to kiss chapped lips.

A snap of the fingers draws Shiro’s attention back to Lance. On his first attempt at speaking the rest of his piece, Lance coughs up a few more rose petals. One sticks to the roof of his mouth, forcing Lance to peel it off. But once they’re out of him, he goes slack against the cushions and pouts at Shiro. His expression gives Shiro the sense that Lance doesn’t know if they can fix anything between them—and that this thought _terrifies_ him.

After a long moment, Lance finally winces his way through a sigh.

“I’m sorry that we didn’t support you in the way that you needed, Shiro. And I’m sorry that we made you feel like you couldn’t trust us any.” Gently, Lance bites into his lower lip. Lets his eyes slip shut as if there’s no other way for him to focus. “And I am so, _so_ sorry that all of the teasing and everything since you’ve got back? Has only made you feel that much worse because we _never_ wanted to do that. We never _wanted_ to hurt you any. Or make you feel like you didn’t belong with us anymore.”

“Well, I’m sorry that I made too many incorrect assumptions about your feelings and—”

Lance’s hand snaps up again, nearly bopping Shiro on the nose. “_My_ turn now, got it?”

Shiro nods. Mimes zipping his lip. Leans his head on the back of the sofa.

“For whatever any kind of apology from me is still worth to you, I just? I wanted you to be _happy_, man. Not whatever _this_ is.” Lance’s voice doesn’t crack—but it teeters like an antique vase whose pedestal keeps getting knocked around by a particularly disrespectful cat. “I’m sorry that things turned out this way. I’m sorry that I helped make you feel like you couldn’t tell me about something huge you were doing for yourself. Then, for totally not listening when you asked me to stop picking on you. And I just…”

Inhaling deeply, Lance somehow keeps his face straight. He pouts earnestly and makes himself meet Shiro’s eyes. “I’m sorry that I got so totally up myself and my own ideas about what happiness should’ve meant for you? That we had to do this to each other before I could appreciate you doing this huge thing for yourself.”

“In your defense? I haven’t exactly been a happy ray of sunshine lately.” Trying to give Lance a smile (and probably coming up short), Shiro sighs. “And I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry for shutting down and lashing out at you. And for assuming reactions that didn’t account for your actual feelings or frame of reference. And for acting like such a jerk about all of this. Y’know, if _my_ apology means anything to you, either—”

“Of _course_ your apology matters to me, man! I only came _down_ here ‘cause I wanted—”

“But why wouldn’t your apology matter to _me_? All I want is for us—”

“Why wouldn’t _your_ apology matter to **_me_**? You’re one of my best friends! I’m dating your brother—”

“Oh my God, we have _got_ to stop sticking Ryou in the middle between us, I—”

Shiro cuts himself off as a pair of fingers press into his lips.

Face screwed up in a glare, Lance tells him, “I hate not feeling like we can hang out anymore. I just want my _Shirito bonito_ back, okay?”

_That’s all I want to get out of this, too_, Shiro would say, if Lance weren’t pinning his lips down. In lieu of that, he nods. After everything they’ve dragged each other through in the past couple months—after everything they’ve shoved in each other’s faces just since Lance came over—simply agreeing that they’re on the same page doesn’t feel like enough.

Whether it is or not, though, Lance launches himself at Shiro’s chest, flings his arms around Shiro’s shoulders, and pulls himself up close to Shiro’s chest. When Shiro hugs him back, Lance squirms and makes a contented-sounding noise.

Humming softly, he says, “So, with these muscles, could you, like? Bench-press me, now?”

Shiro snorts. “Pretty easily, yeah. I could still bench-press Keith, if he wanted to let me.”

“Ugh, come on, man!” Laughing like a summer breeze, Lance play-swats at Shiro’s shoulder. “I don’t need to know what you and Mullet-Head do in the bedroom. I’m not paying for your porn, okay? Keep that to yourselves.”

“I didn’t say that I _have_ done that. Only that I _could_.” With that said, Shiro ruffles Lance’s hair. “Thanks for pushing your way in and talking to me, Sharpshooter.”

With a soft sigh, Lance burrows into Shiro’s shoulder. “Thanks for pulling your head out of your ass and talking back, _bonito_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this is not everything that I have written, but the remaining chapters are all in varying states of completion, so…… Here’s to maybe having this get easier because I posted things.
> 
> Next time, Sendak and Keith meet each other. Shiro catastrophizes a lot of things, as he so often does. Shiro blows Keith against a bookshelf because it’s fun, and they have the threat of discovery going on. Yay.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including:
> 
>   * Short comments
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>   * Comments made with the [LLF Comment Builder](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/post/170952243543/now-presenting-the-llf-comment-builder-beta).
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> The author reads and appreciates all comments, and gets back to all of them eventually, but may be slow to reply due to trying to rein in the ADHD/anxiety cocktail.
> 
> If, for any reason, you don’t want to receive a reply, just put, “whisper” near the start of your comment, and I’ll appreciate it without replying.
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> * * *
> 
> As ever, I’m also on Discord (**amorremanet#5500**), Twitter (**[amorremanet](https://twitter.com/amorremanet/)**), Tumblr (**[amorremanet](http://amorremanet.tumblr.com/)**, though not quite as often anymore), Pillowfort (**[amorremanet](https://www.pillowfort.io/amorremanet)**), Dreamwidth (**[amor_remanet](http://amor-remanet.dreamwidth.org/)**), my kink-specific sideblog (**[amorremanet](http://chubbyshiro.tumblr.com/)**)—and I always love talking about Sheith and all that good, gay shit.


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